Hard Drive Failure: Is Power Cut Risky?

[username]

Sometimes my electricity cuts out completely when I am running win2k pro (pesky coin meter) do you think this could damage a harddrive attached to my system, I have had one master boot go down on me already?

 

[BoulderHead]

I don't know if it could lead to hard drive failure but certainly the risk of data corruption exists. When you talk about having a master boot go down I assume you mean the boot.ini file wasn't found upon rebooting of the computer? This would be an instance of data corruption rather than hard drive failure.

 

[Mudvaynelethaldosage]

This could definitely damage a hard drive. A hard drive is a magnetic metal disk (usually several, I believe) that spins. It holds all your data with a system of on and off switches known as bits. There are pieces called "heads" inside your hard drive that read from the magnetic disk. They don't touch the disk, but come very close to touching it. When you cut power to your pc, these heads are left off the disk surface. Your hard drive can get damaged seriously if it is bumped hard in this condition. When you actually shut down your pc the proper way, the heads lock into grooves specifically made for them so that the hard drive can handle more abuse before failure. I don't know if everything in there is correct, but that's pretty close to correct.

 

[robphy]

A "UPS" (uninterruptible power supply) or "battery backup" is not too expensive these days. Many models come with Windows and Linux software that knows when the UPS is the one supplying the power. The operating system can be told to begin a proper shutdown process after being in this state for some time.

For example,
http://www.apcc.com/products/category.cfm?id=13
http://www.tripplite.com/products/ups/index.cfm

 

[username]

Yeah sounds about right, I guess there can be no fail safe if the harddrive has no internal power supply. Wonder if there is some sort of cheap internal ups system you can link up in series with the hd's power supply.

I don't know if it could lead to hard drive failure but certainly the risk of data corruption exists. When you talk about having a master boot go down I assume you mean the boot.ini file wasn't found upon rebooting of the computer? This would be an instance of data corruption rather than hard drive failure.

I think the hardware error caused the software error so to speak. The drive was making all sorts of funny noises and did not show up in bios :/ lucky I keep a backup os on a spare disk. Eventually got it work again and using data recovery tools etc I got most of my important data of it before thowing it away. Good few days down the pooper and a lot of sweating though.

edit: Thanks for the above post will check out the links

 

[Saint]

Seagate hardrive is lousy, bad sectors developed into multi-megabytes after a few months use.
MAxtor or WD is better.