Reset......
My friend told me that keep on resetting computer will damage harddisk

Oh no... I do this often when my computer hangs
If computer hangs, is there anyway to prevent from resetting.

Unless you do it very often (many times a minute), i think the worst it could do is corrupt your filesystem, so you will need to reformat and reinstall everything when this happens. You better find and fix the cause for the hangs.

If you reset, make sure that the hard disc is not read/writing (the light is off). If it is idle, there is no immediate danger. I don't think there is any danger at all. At work we have computers (HP Vectra VE) that reboot 14 times a day since 3 years, 365 days per year. They have rebooted about 15,000 times !

The problem is rebooting while the disc is writing a file : the file system will become corrupted.

Once I accidentally shut down the power of the hard drive while Windows was loading. Result : 25 MB of lost data in Windows\system ! I had to format and reinstall everything. The archive files on other partitions were OK, and the Hard disc still works well.

Anyway, when your computer hangs, always try to ctrl-alt-del (hold ctrl-alt and press del several times). It may be softer than to reset.

Only with FAT, not with NTFS.

Where is there evidence of this? I know that NTFS is a Journalled Fileing system, in that it tracks which files it is currently reading and/or writing to, so that in the even of a power faliure, it doesn't have to scan every single file in order to check it's integrity (like FAT). It can simply check the possibly affected files.

It should still be very possible that corruption can occur if power is taken off during a read or write though. I have experienced it myself, during a power cut whilst booting my system!! Unless of course something else caused this, hence me asking for more info.

I rarely run Win2K nowedays with no important stuff on it, only for PIC programming so im not to fussed anymore anyways!

Cheers,

Kristian

Anytime you perform a hard reset, any data left in the 'delayed write' buffer will be lost. Depending what the data is and what you were doing with it will govern whether or not corruption occurs. This will happen with any OS that operates, or is set up, on this basis.

If the power fails during a read/write operation, the hard disk can actually get severely damaged, because the read/write head will rest on the disc surface (instead of being locked into its park position). I have done this twice so far and have luckily gotten away with it, but a friend of mine had his hard disk wrecked when a power cut-out occured while the disk was being accessed.

There is no way this should happen with a modern disk drive. The heads and the arms to which they are fixed are rigid. In any event, even though the heads fly almost in contact with the disk surface, the surface is protectively coated. Once power is removed, the arms automatically park. The switch that allows head movement is electromagnetic and once power is removed, the spring against which the arm is moved autmatically returns the arm to the park postiton. If you have a 'dead' drive available, open it up and you will see what I mean.

Old drives and certain specific kinds of drives where very susceptible to this problem, but modern drives using armatures for head movement shouldn't suffer from this.

Ah... OK then, thanks for the information. Seems like I'm a little behind.

That does make me wonder what caused my mate's disk to break after that power cut, though...

Was the system powered up normally, or by the return of the power service? I only ask because spikes in the service, such as you would get in these circumstances, can cause a lot more damage than the cut ever would.

UPS's are so cheap nowadays...there's no reason NOT to have one (so come on xen...buy one... ... ... ya cheap skate!). One of these coupled with a GOOD OS (W2k for me...only one crash I couldn't recover from (using Task Manager) in 2 years) and your protected. They not only protect against surges (to a high degree), but they condition the power, and (of course)...protect against sudden power loss.

xen-uno

Windows2K/WinXP task manager is great, alot better than the old 98 CTRL-ALT-BALEET menu thing. It's like a sweet sweet ejection handle, you can hit CTRL-ALT-DEL (CTRL-ALT-INS in my case... I traded someone a DEL key for an INS key) and you get the nice pretty desktop and the little box with the buttons on it. The one time it didn't save me was when i got the WinXP BSoD (it exists, just in a severely mutated form). It was all like "Critical stop" "You bwoke it" "errrhhh".

The thing that caused it to go all broken?

Blood 1.

I wish this story had a moral.

Cheap UPS do not provide regulated voltage. They bypass the home voltage, applying a lowpass filter to reject EMI, and monitoring for surge or power failure. In the latter case, they switch to batteries for about 10 minutes, if they are new (several seconds if they are old, it seems).
They do not protect against strong EMI. Example, I've got a killer switch in my fridge, 7 meters away from the computer. It has twice set my stereo ampli to "overload" when turning off the fridge !
And it has once frozen the computer (with UPS). It must have caused a data error in a chip, and the whole system, including the mouse, froze.
My UPS only showed useful twice. During storms the current sometimes goes down for one second, then the UPS goes in and keeps the computer on.

UPS providing permanently regulated voltage are big and expensive.

Haha, Monolith... reminds me of the good ol' days, when Old Man Murray was still online. OMM would rip into Jason Hall (Monolith employee) almost as much as they'd pick on Levelord and John Romero. I still remember the "interview" they had with Jason Hall, where they would alternately deride and fear Jason's massive muscles. And they made fun of Shogo about once a month, for several years after its release.

One of the last OMM posts simply had screenshots from four different first-person-shooter Monolith games, all with the same motif: dead scientists lying around in a space-age computer room. Does Blood 1 have scientists in it?

Do you mean that the UPS's that claim "line conditioning" will not help with the fridge situation you've described?

So the shoebox-sized US$300 UPS's don't work for this task, but the table-sized $3000 (or whatever) UPS's are required for this application? (I don't mean to put words in your mouth, I just have no idea about UPS's.)

Shoebox UPS have filters that protect the computer from such serial killer fridges. This one was just too strong to be filtered. It certainly affected the computer through air transmission, not power supply. It can be surprising, but when you switch a light with a bad switch, so as to produce clicks in the hifi, you can hear the clicks as well in a portable player on batteries. The switches emit bursts of electromagnetic waves that travels in air, like radiowaves.

A "table" UPS, on the other hand, permanently generates a stable alternative voltage, whatever happens at the input.

In sought España, a cosin of mine have voltage problems. The nominal voltage there is 230 V AC, like in the rest of Europe, but the voltage can fall down to 180 V for hours, preventing computers to work properly.

His shoebox UPS is of no help, because it just switches to batteries, and after 10 minutes, the batteries are empty, and the computer can't work anymore.

One of his friends runs a cybecafe, and his "table-sized" UPS have no problem generating clean 230 V AC from the unstable input, even if it falls permanently to 180 V.

EDIT : (or does it just have more batteries ?)

Ah, nothing like a dimmer... (joke)

It's not inconceivable for a good UPS to permanently provide 230V from 180V. Some kind of smart transformer, I guess...

It's not true. Even NTFS still suffer of corruption. I've ever had my windows XP (NTFS) boot system corrupted after several time reseting my computer during booting process that I had to reinstall my windows XP.

maybe a better OS whould do ;-)

I had win 98 for a long time, but you have to reinstall it from time to time (or you dont do much with it...), or you will experience regular freezes, crashes and sloooooowwwwwing down... its crap. And I dont want to use win NT, or XP cuz they are still bigger, slower, and I like some feeling of control, which I had with win98 and alot little progs. and also I dont like M$ too ;-)

im busy getting Linux running now, works fine but its not finished imho. But I can handle it... the disadvantage is it takes alot time to learn working with it, and get it running smoothly, but the advantage is that it looks alot better, is much more customizable and much much much more stable.

later