hi i am new and i wanna ask that is it harmful to the hard disk if i restore an image i created with True image 6 every week coz
i have heard that making and breaking partitions alot can create bad sectors in hard disk(is this true) and
i think that when TI 6 restores an image of a partition it first breaks that partition and then makes it again(is this true)

plz answer i am confused

Not harmful at all.

It is probably not harmful but thats a lot of wear and tear on the HDD, it may shorten the lifespan, unless you don't care and can easily replace it, then its fine.

^^ if you have read the Virtual Memory Optimization guide (Here, page "Is Writing And Rewriting To The Same Area Dangerous?"), Maxtor and IBM said that reading/writing on the harddisk a lot doesn't damage it, as there is no real contact between the heads and the disk plates, and they only change magnetic fields, and there is no wear on doing so...

I dunno man, I personally don't trust that, one of my close friends at a time, did wedding video editing, and bought some highly rated SCSI barraccuda drives which were best rated for wear and tear, as they were formatted 2x-3x on a daily basis. After 3mo one actually died but he got a new one cause it was under warranty. So take this live example as you will, I never trust what any company says, I see them all as trying to sell and say what they need based on some unknwn tests they did. My policy is to always test myself and always conclude based on what I have encountered personally. Whenever I suggest something to any member here, its not based on a website, or what someone said, or whatnot, and if it is, I say it just that way, I spent.. rather lost lots of money by buying what even some reputable sites claimed about products, only to be very dissappointed.

Thx for the link though, does make this matter something more for me to investigate...

i imagine that the heads and the things rotating inside will go bad before the platters, but i dont know much

...restore True image 6's image every week ? why would you want to do this anyway ?

yes, i'm with you in not beleiving what companies said, but also it makes a bit sense for me. I've been using PC's since 1991, and all the time i used harddisk, the first one (WD 40 MB) was the only one that died from bad sectors, all the others are still working till now (even the 80MB one that came as a replacement for the dead 40MB, not even 1 bad sector).
but i saw some friends who had bad drives, and most of them were Maxtor, which i never used, i like Western Digital ones, and a couple of times i got IBM.

i remembered a rumor i once heard, that low level formating a harddrive will acctually removes a very tiny layer from the plater surface, but i was wondering where they put the residues

if you reimage a harddisk, be it with Ghost, Powerquest, true image or whatever it will not affect the lifespan of the harddrive, also it will not cause bad sectors. I have been working with computers and reimageing machines for years and have not lost a hard drive in the last 5.