Could I have damaged my hdd for unadequate ventilation?

Hi, anyone thinks I could have damaged the internal HDD of mi mid 2011 mac mini by having papers/magazines on top of it while using? my HDD is not responding or restoring either and windows PC does not recognizes it now that I have taken it out of the mini and put in on an enclosure.
I had updated OSx to mountain lion (lion was on it originally) so I don't know if that can make your hdd work harder than the original OSx on the mini when purchased.
At first it got slow while playing games like bejeweled and stuff like that but one day it just didn't boot, and tried several times to restore it but it kept failing. So I have taken it out of the mini and try to use an external enclosure to format it but windows 7 doesn't show it on the explorer.
I have screwed up another hdd for a dell inspiron laptop before and the only explanation I can think of is maybe overheating because mi mac mini didn't had proper ventilation (I mean, nothing on top or besides it in the desktop) so I'm starting to think that maybe that happened again.
If i remember correctly I ran hardware diagnostics once but it didin't said anything was wrong except for the hdd that needed to be fixed and after that I tried to format but it didn't respond.
I used my mini for garageband recording, casual games and the usual internet/social network stuff... so if I get a new hdd I may get something a bit faster (came with 500 GB 5400 RPM HDD, I'm thinking of 7200 RPM) to improve garageband responsiveness.

According to Google Laboratories test of hard drive failure, the largest test of hard drive reliabiity to date (which you can download here) many accepted truisms about hard drive failure factors are simply not true. Perhaps the greatest surprise was the fact that excessive heat was NOT a significant factor in drive failure. So it is unlikely you caused the failure becasue of running the drive too hot. That said and the Google Labs test aside I prefer to keep my drives well ventilated and use enclosures that do a good job of conducting heat away from the mechanism.

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Could I have damaged my hard drive?

Yesterday I was moving my router and cable modem around my desk, and, to make a long story short, some cables were tangled and a small desk lamp took a four-foot swan dive onto my MacBook Pro. The point of impact was about two inches below the keyboard and one half inch from the left side of the computer (it was open), resulting in a maybe 1/8" dent in the top case.
I didn't think much of it (other than "I'm an idiot" and "I wonder ho much top cases go for on eBay) until about an hour later when my computer froze up. After a minute or so of rainbow pinwheel, it went to the blank blue screen. After staring at this for a minute or two, I went for a manual power down. Unfortunately, when I tried to boot up again, I couldn't get past the gray screen with the apple logo and the spinning wheel graphic. I tried running Disk Utility and repaired my permissions to no avail. Then I tried archiving and reinstalling to try to fix the issue, but each time it would hang up in the "Copying Base Files" (or something like that) stage at a given percent and go no further. It was at this point that one of my roommates pointed out some strange noises, and they were estrange indeed: Clicking and popping sounds coming from the hard drive area, along with intermittent spooling up and slowing back down.
Starting to fear the worst, I picked up a FireWire cable this morning (I can't believe how hard it so to find those things) and ran Target Disk on a Mac Pro in a nearby computer lab to try to rescue some of the essentials (I am lazy and have not backed up in about a month). I noticed as many partial installs as times I had attempted to install OS X, and a corresponding number of archived files. While most of my files copied fine, a few gave me an error that read like this:
"The Finder cannot complete the operation because some data in "Lightroom 2 Catalog Previews.lrdata" could not be read or written. (Error code -36)"
I tried running Hardware Test from my install DVD, and both the regular and extended tests came back with "No trouble found."
Based on the facts that the computer took a sudden impact directly above the hard drive, the drive itself seems to be hanging up when being written to at certain points, and some of the data seems to have been damaged (not to mention the "click pop" soundtrack when the drive hangs up), my guess is that the hard drive might need replacing. I have a fair idea of what I'm doing and have no problem doing a little open-Mac surgery (not to mention the fact that 7200rpm 200GB+ drives are now under $100- when did that happen), but Id really like to be able to confirm that this is the problem. I have never actually had to troubleshoot hardware issues like this. Is there something else that I can run, or is it a pretty safe bet that the drive is trashed?
Later this afternoon I'm going to drag the 300GB external down to the lab, restart target Disk, and copy as much as I can, but i think with the errors I've been seeing it's a safe bet that much of it is trashed. After that ,I'm going to make a last-ditch effort to reformat the drive and do a clean install, but I'm betting that it will either hang up partway through the erasing process, or get stuck on the writing side like it did with the archive and reinstall.
Any advice you can offer will be greatly appreciated. As a student, I'm sure you can imagine the urgency here.
Message was edited by: anthonyhemming

Yes, I too fear the bluing and tattooing to be the case.
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The area that is most vulnerable is also the area you can't easily see: the underside of the logic board where most solder connections are made. It would be easy for water droplets to condense on and around some of the projecting connectors. If a drop carried across two or more connectors and you turn it on....
I'm not too worried about the hard drive; they are usually well sealed against moisture.
It possible that the act of powering up the computer did damage. Normally, when one knows the computer is damp, you wait several days with the computer in a dry place to allow time for all moisture to escape.
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I've recently had an issue with my mac pro which may have highlighted an issue which has been there for a while and I'm looking for some advice.
Around a year ago I upgraded a few HDs and the ram in my 2007 mac pro [xeon quad-3.0ghz]
I bought an OCZ Vertex SSD for the system drive and when I first installed 10.6 on to it, it would boot super fast. At the same time I also ordered 8gb [2x4gb sticks] of cheap ram from eBay.
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However, recently my machine stopped booting altogether and would hang but then go to the flashing "question mark on folder" and stay there.
I tried a number of things including swapping drive bays and cleaning any dust from the inside of the machine but didn't have any luck until I went back to my using the 1gb of ram I got with the machine. The machine then booted with no problem.
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1. Did you run DU verify/repair on all your mounted drives?
2. Did you check your Startup Disk system preferences that the boot drive is explicitly specified? If not, when you boot, the system will search around for the boot drive until it finds it. During that search it will display the flashing question mark. Of course that will continue if it never finds a valid boot disk.
3. If you disconnect all unneeded periphials (disk, firewires, usb's) would it boot?
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Could I have damaged my hdd for unadequate ventilation?

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