Interrupted OSX install on drive and now it's full of bad blocks?

Question

So yesterday I was installing OSX Tiger on an external drive in order to run Disk Warrrior and I decided half thru installation that I'd rather partition the drive and only use up a portion instead so I cancelled the installation by hard reset and now the hard drive won't initialize in Disk Utility and so far the surface scan test reports 28000+ bad blocks. What is the likelihood that my actions could have caused this?

Answer 1

According to the tech from MicroMat, this is not necessarily true.
Interesting. I've been told that there is no way the OS can tell the drive to map out some specific physical block, only that it wants to read or write to some logical sector, which the drive translates to the cooresponding physical one. If the drive detects that the physical one is bad, it maps the logical sector to a spare if it can. This map is kept in the drive's firmware & generally cannot be accessed or changed short of factory-type procedures -- for all practical user purposes, it is a permanent change.
The various tech responses in the URL you mentioned seem to imply this is true. At one point he mentions that TTP's surface scan should not turn up the same bad block more than once, since once accessed the drive will not access that (physical) block again. It also appears that TTP & similar utilities can't actually mark blocks bad either, they instead mark ones they judge marginal as used in the file system, which is no more permanent than the file system itself. (The mention of Intech's SpeedTools Media Scanner somehow getting around this was interesting, though.)
I think what the tech meant about zeroing out data permanently remapping a bad block was in reference to this (the file system map vs. the firmware one), but I'm by no means certain. However, what he said about a multipass zero erase being no better than a single pass one makes me believe the only "miss" involved is for (physical) blocks not yet accessed by the drive.
Certainly, that will delete the partion information ...
I guess I wasn't being clear either. There are partitions that don't store regular data but metadata about the drive format itself, for example if uses an Apple or PC partition scheme. I do not believe such partitions are "zeroed out" with any "Erase" tab option of Disk Utility, although they may be written to, for instance to update the fact that only one Mac volume exists after a 'whole disk' erase.
To sum up, what I'm trying to say is that the drive has to access a sector to detect & map a bad one to a spare. If the drive doesn't do that, no utility will either. They are useful to monitor the rate of bad block creation/detection, but that is primarily a check of the drive's health, not a way to avoid problems resulting from bad blocks themselves.