Thread: Auto power off

Accord: You are so full of crap its coming out your ears and onto the floor.
There is nothing you can do to a HD that can't be fixed with a High-level format, besides dropping it on the floor. You can't even do a Lowlevel format on a drive, it had to be done once, and at the factory.
There is no problem with turning Dos off without shuting down, I didn't even know there was a special way to turn it off, and I have been using it for years.

I tend to disagree lstrunk, I've found a few bad sectors on my hard drives after improperly shutting down, and those could not be fixed with a format. I then had 150 mb of unusable space on my HD.

Datman: That was most likely not caused by an improper shutdown, it was probably an error in you disk that was caused at the factory, and then decided to show up when you did a scan-disk after an improper shutdown.
Have you tried reformatting?
IF that still doesn't work, send it back to the manufacturer if its still under warranty.

Keep it friendly guys, or I will close this topic.

Accord: New drives have a return spring (or sometimes small magnet) that returns thead to parking position after power is cut. A latch then locks the head in place.

Accord - when I first read your post, I had a very hard time seeing what you were trying to say. When you use terms like "FAT Files" which you mentioned are from the DOS days, many of us might not get what you were trying to say. Also, I don't understand how you make the link between the FAT being corrupted and the hard drive being unuseable. The FAT is strictly an OS-managed area of the disk. It has nothing to do with low-level hard disk operation.


Let me clear a few things up:

1. Hard disk scratching: There is no way you can possibly physically damage a hard disk except by some physical means (i.e. dropping or banging on the drive). The heads inside a hard disk are suspended above the disk. They will never touch the disk during operation, even during an improper shutdown. The only way the heads will "scratch" the disk is if the hard drive is jarred beyond its rated tolerance while the disk is spinning.

2. Disk parking: All new hard disks have a built-in auto-park feature. The head is automatically moved to a "landing zone" or protected area, and held there by a latching mechanism until it is powered up and initialized again. You can hear this happen when you turn off your PC and hear the hard disk make a "click" sound. This happens automatically regardless of a "clean" or "dirty" shutdown. This is why there is an the "I" in IDE (Intelligent Drive Electronics).

3. Bad sectors: These can only happen in a few situations. One is from a physical head crash (when the disk is physically jarred while operating, causing the head(s) to momentarily come in contact with the disk platter and scratch or pit the surface, causing permanent physical damage). Another way (mentioned earlier) is by a virus program that maliciously marks sectors as bad. Once a sector is marked bad, the OS will no longer attempt to read or write to it. I believe the bad-sector flag will even survive formatting.

4. If any damage happens from an improper shutdown, it is usually like Aaron said, settings are not saved, or in some cases files are corrupted. The corruption can happen if the file is in the middle of being written when the power was lost (partial update of file) or if some critical area (such as the registry) was not updated properly before power was lost.

Keep in mind that the OS manufacturers took into account the fact that there are situations when a PC may lose power (such as AC failure, etc.). Thus this is why most OS's (Linux, Windows, etc.) do some sort of housekeeping on the system files and FAT (or whatever type of file allocation system is used) tables when power is restored. Using these utilities as part of a "normal" startup/shutdown sequence was not what the OS companies intended. Improper shutdown is likely to cause problems eventually, so it is always good to do a proper shutdown whenever possible.

Accord: If you are only reading from a hard drive like traxxis originally said, you cannot corrupt it by cutting power.

(unless you drop it or something)

Oh, and I've been cutting power to my hard drive 2 or 3 times a day for almost a year, and don't have a single bad sector! Like I said, you can't corrupt a drive when reading from it!

Well Accord is right in that the drive is being written even though your software is only "reading". Windows reads and writes to the disk behind the scenes constantly while the OS is running.