Can a power loss break a hard disk?

Today I was working when all of a sudden a power loss (in the entire house) occurs.

I tried to reboot the machine but it states that there's an "Ebios error"; tried with an Ubuntu 9.04 live cd and while booting it states that there are various I/O errors on the first partition (the one with the boot sector).

Now I managed to backup all of my data (using the live cd aforementioned) but I don't know if it'll worth the hassle of a reinstallation (and if it could do something useful) or if the only thing to do is to drop the hard disk as far as possible...

Thanks in advance.

EDIT: It was a very fast shutdown, but the power came back after 5 minutes or so (so very gently)...but the disk is definitely damaged!

Solution 1:

Power loss CAN damage a harddisk, but it would be unlikely, yet if you feel uncomfortable or just want to be a 100% sure, consider buying yourself a fine brand new hard drive... The fact that your harddrive is giving you I/O messages isn't a good sign anyway...

Solution 2:

We've found that in many cases it isn't the power loss that causes the problem, it's the power surge that happens when power comes back that can cause problems. Not all power strips are created equal in this regard.

Solution 3:

Power loss shouldn't do any physical damage to the disk, as most modern disks use the inertia of the platters to safely park the head when they suddenly lose power. However, depending on why the power went out (power surge tripping breakers, for instance), it's possible damage was done that way, or if the PSU in the machine reacted badly to losing power.

Solution 4:

I agree with my understanding of what all the previous answers are saying.

• Sudden power loss is very unlikely to physically damage a hard drive. While anything is possible, this sure doesn't seem probable.
• Sudden power surge, possibly could cause hard drive damage. But this also not the most likely failure mode.

What is more likely IMO is that the file system on the drive might have been corrupted. The likelihood of this increases if you are using an older file system which does not support journaling such as FAT or FAT32.

I think it is more likely that damage, if it occured was to the file system rather than to the Master Boot Record (MBR) of the drive. The MBR is read from rarely and written too even less often. So it seems more likely to me that you damaged the file system than the MBR.

You do not say which operating system was running and what file system it uses. These are potentially important pieces of this puzzle.

While checking out the drive with a hardware diagnostic program is a good idea, I would probably start by running a file system integrity check. If you are using windows then run CHKDSK.

If the problem is happening on your boot drive or partition you may need to boot from your install media to verify the file system.

In any event, I hope you had a current backup of any data on the drive which you value.