Ubuntu server and power off

James Plate james.plate at gmail.com
Mon May 7 09:52:08 UTC 2012


On 05/07/2012 05:07 AM, Colin Law wrote:
> 2012/5/7 James Plate <james.plate at gmail.com>:
>> On 05/07/2012 03:31 AM, Antonio Fernández Pérez wrote:
>>> Hi everybody,
>>>
>>> I have configured a machine to print Wi-Fi tickets with Ubuntu Server
>>> and OpenBox desktop manager that launch a Java graphical application
>>> on boot. If the machine will be shutdown by power button, what effects
>>> could to have? Could it affect to some partition? Could corrupt the
>>> system and not start? There are some tool to repair the boot and make
>>> that the system boots normally?
>>>  [pointless Spanish (I think) legal rubbish deleted - even more pointless than normal since this is an English speaking list]
>> Yes it most certainly can cause hardware issues, including but not
>> limited to corrupted sectors on your hard disk.
> Though in practice it is very rare that it actually causes any
> problems with modern file systems.  As far as I can remember I have
> never lost anything on Linux when this happens except for data in
> files on which I was currently working, or once when the system was
> trashed by a power failure in the middle of a kernel upgrade.  But
> that was caused by the fact that I had a half installed kernel, which
> was not good.
>
> @James, what problems can it cause apart from corrupting data being
> written at the time of failure?
>
> Colin
>
I'm sure it's a rare occurence with new hardware but historically it
could physically damage the disk platter, espescially if the disk is
being accessed when a shutdown was forced/power lost. I could be out of
date with my info. I've just made it a habit for a long time to not make
a habit of hard resets/shutdowns.




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