Does partitioning put more wear and tear on your hard drive?

don't think there will be any difference
what do you mean by a repair drive? if the hard drive does break ALL partitions will be lost

I've never had any experiences in my tech work with hard drive failures attributable to partitioning. If a drive is going to fail, it's going to fail regardless of partitions.

The only extra wear and tear I can think of is if the drive is reformatted and repartitioned often, but that's just a general usage issue.

Taken from a Maximum PC article:

"Using multiple partitions reduces application performance because you are running I/O to more than one partition on the same disk..."

Thus running I/O means more head movement and wear on the hardware components.

if anything I would think it would cause less wear and tear because it doesn't have to search through as much to find a given file.

I think any benefit or degradation to the longevity of the drive would be miniscule. Like rower said, when the drives die, they die. I had roughly 6 drives fail this year. 5 had single partitions and 1 had multiple. 3 were the moving mechanisms and 3 were circuitry. (as far as I can tell.) And in all cases it was a failure that would render both partitions inaccessible. Multiple partitions would save you if you had a good backup on the second partition and you formatted or deleted your your main drive. But that wouldn't be due to hardware failure.

Basically I go by this rule of thumb. Never trust a drive's reliability after 3 years or age. (no matter how little it has been run.) After two years of age on a drive make sure that you have good backups. After 3 years, if the data is very important, consider upgrading to a larger new drive. Then you get the extra space, and fresh hardware to wear out.