I originally bought an 80gig drive a couple of years ago. I believe
that it
arrived with a flaw, which then was made worse by the fact that I
was trying
to do MS-based things to it - FDISK's verification process,
specifically,
which I believe is more-or-less the same as Scandisk's surface scan.
While I
was running FSISK, it started having problems. Then there was a
horrible
clicking noise, and then there were bad clusters all over the place.
The
hard drive was getting eaten up by the process, so I downloaded
Maxtor's own
utilities. It was already too late for that drive by that point (the
utility
hadn't come with the hard drive), so I got a replacement and used
Maxtor's
utility this time to set the drive up - with no problems.

FDisk would NOT damage a drive unless the drive was already defective,
or you had your BIOS settings wrong and overstepped the drive. I'm
pretty sure that todays drives won't let you actually do damage by
overstepping, either.

I was reminded of this whole episode this evening. Windows decided
on
booting that the drive might have bad clusters, and proceeded to do
a
surface check. It found a bad cluster, and then started hunting
deeper. It
found a couple and was going rather slowly, so given my earlier
experiences
I stopped it from carrying on and used Maxtor's utility again to
check it.
It found problems with the START, but the Advanced test was able to
fix it.
On a reboot Windows Scandisk flew through the check with no further
problems.

Scandisk can scramble the data on a hard drive, especially if there
are other issues (bad power, bad cable, etc.) but it won't physically
damage a drive.

I am of the opinion that with my particular model of hard drive the
Windows
surface scan utilities will only make any problems worse. Like
picking at a
scab will stop it from healing. It seems reasonably likely to me
that this
is also the case with other Maxtor hard drives, and perhaps those of
other
manufacturers. I would strongly advise against letting Windows do a
surface
scan under any circumstances in which there might be a problem, and
instead
use the utilities supplied by the manufacturer of the hard drive.

Nope. Scandisk may find defects, but it won't create them.