ITunes 4.9 and 5.0 killed my hard drive

Question

I've seen various reports of iTunes problems littering the whole iTunes forum and other places but none seem quite as bad as my problem.
I was happily using Panther (10.3.9), QuickTime 6.5.2 (haven't upgraded QT yet because of the problems with that) and hardly touched iTunes. Then I had the bright idea of importing my entire CD collection (500-odd CDs) into iTunes 4.7. No problem, it worked. Got to about CD 100, then iTunes 4.9 arrived. I duly upgraded and then the nightmare began.
Importing from CD was ok until a sudden freeze locking the whole system requiring a hard restart (hold power button down for several seconds until shutdown, then restart). Repaired permissions and all seemed well for a while. I then discovered that several of the newly imported songs were corrupted, the CDDB file corrupted and the iTunes library corrupted.
I took the CDDB file from a backup, rebuilt the library and trashed the corrupted songs. All seemed well for a short while. Then strange behaviour.
Unexplained system freezes with spinning balls, usually on disk access when saving a file or during a safari download. Force quit didn't work (key combination didn't even bring up the window), control-click on the app's dock icon shows "application not responding" and allows a force quit, but then freezes the dock; everything freezes requiring hard restart. transferred as much as possible to a new disk, erased, reinstalled Panther from scratch and brought it up to date with all the appropriate downloads. Tried iTunes again with a clean system, worked for a while and the froze requiring a hard restart.
This was with a new and clean system with no original user folders or data. This then caused erratic system behaviour, all requiring hard restarts.
The final straw was a crash when trying to reinstall the clean system (again) for the sixth time and the whole thing froze. My hard disc was installed in March and is a Hitachi Travelstar 60GB 7200 rpm one. TechTool Pro now indicates it has bad blocks - sort of odd for a drive only 5 months old.
Presumably all those hard restarts have caused major problems, and the hard restarts were caused by iTunes.
Rarely has an Apple update caused me such problems. I have to go back to System 7.5.5 to report such problems.
Has anyone else had such major problems or is it just me?

Answer 1

Installation of iTunes and restarts of the system could not cause bad blocks - a corrupted disk directory, yes, but not bad blocks. More likely it's the reverse; problems with the drive are what has caused the problems with iTunes and your system. If Disk Utility is reporting problems with erasing the drive and cannot do it successfully, then it would seem to me that the drive is defective and should be replaced.