Can a “defective” T42 damage its HDD?

[brooklynboy]

I recently helped a friend select and order a T42. After a few weeks, the machine began running slowly and erratically, so I did a surface scan. The disk drive, a beautiful 7K60, had suffered infant mortality—there were a number of bad sectors, apparently in places that simply hadn’t been accessed until that point in time.

I swapped the drive with a replacement sent by IBM, spent about a day rebuilding the system from the IBM CDs, installing her other application software, customizing Windows, and scraping her data from the bad drive and restoring it to the new one.

Everything was fine for about a month, but now the T42 won’t boot either normally or from the service partition, and there are frighteningly loud clicking and clunking noises coming from the drive.

My friend, quite naturally, is convinced that she got a “lemon” ThinkPad and wants to try to get it replaced entirely or get a refund so that she can buy a Dell. As far as I can tell, she was just very unlucky, and got two bad Hitachi drives.

My question to the group is this: Is there ANYTHING about the T42 itself that could be defective in such a way as to destroy two successive hard drives? Assume that no one has used the ThinkPad as a tennis racket or a hammer.

[MobileGuru]

My take would be one of these potential causes:

1. Active drive protection disabled or uninstalled.
2. Suspend on screen close setting adjusted to disabled.
3. Frequently carrying machine from that corner only.
4. Very unlucky user experience.

[brooklynboy]

Thanks, MG.

1 and 2. These were set appropriately both times I set up the machine. It's conceivable that my friend might have changed these settings accidentally, but she had neither the reason nor the knowledge to do so intentionally.

3. She's right-handed, so it's possible that she grabbed the machine by the right-front corner. On the other hand, it spent about 95% of its two-month life docked on her desk. Is it really possible to damage the HDD by casually grabbing the machine that way just a few times?

4. Seems likely, no? But awfully coincidental.