Can viruses cause SMART and other drive tests to fail?

[RegEdit]

Can a virus cause an otherwise perfectly health drive to fail tests such as the drive fitness test and SMART tests? Now that I've backed up data I will try zero wiping this drive, but I'm not sure if I'm wasting my time.

 

[iisjman07]

The SMART data is stored on the drive (which is why it's liable for corruption and can't always be trusted), so I would assume it's technically possible to change SMART data using a virus. However, I don't believe any such malware exists.

In terms of making a drive fail through bad sectors, MHDD (a DOS based windows executable) has function to develop bad sectors on a drive, but I'm not sure this would be possible from within Windows

 

[NETWizz]

In general "NO" a hard drive failure is a hardware failure and a Virus is just a windows Program, Application, Process, or Thread... I.e. A virus is software not hardware!

This, of course, doesn't mean I know everything and that there isn't some special scenario I don't know about.

The sure fix would be to replace the drive and do a clean installation of the OS, drivers, software, and data... Just make sure to clean any data, so it is not infected with any viruses.

 

[Technitiate]

Possible, maybe? Realistic, not from everything I've heard.

I once had one of the Customer service representatives at my company tell a customer that his hard drive had possibly failed because a virus had caused the drive to spin too fast- he believed it too.

 

[Cambridge PC Support]

I once had one of the Customer service representatives at my company tell a customer that his hard drive had possibly failed because a virus had caused the drive to spin too fast- he believed it too.

Ah that must be the new variant of that old virus that used to spin up the floppy drive to make it sound like a washing machine

 

[rob781]

Back in the day there was some viruses that could damage hardware, you can overload the Smart data and cause a Smart Failure and lock out the drive.. there where also some virus that over wrote the system data on the drive for Ide's which could cause the hard-drive to be a paper waight (ie # sectors, sector size, # platters), I have also see some virus the will flash the BIOS and reprogram it with the virus code(not even taking out the battery would clear it, had to use an EEPROM programmer to reprogram it).. this will req some very good hackers that know allot about programing in Assembly language to do that.. so very few of the of this viruses exist. some Evan could write to a write protected floppy disk(I know this can be done because I saw my Friend do it)