improper shutdown

[swordfish86]

How damaging is an improper shutdown to a mac? ie can this have permanent 'pysical' damage to your computer & hardware, or does it just have a chance of messing up your files, until you repair disc or permittions, or reinstall the OS? unless of course you have done hardware and disc verification and all has passed?

its just ive had to do a few improper shutdowns though no fault of my own and i wanted some peace of mind!

many thanks!!

 

[hidea]

Naw

It's not damaging per say. The only 'bad' thing would be data corruption if you leave things unsaved. That's all.

Hardware wise, meh...... I've done it a billion times, nothing ever happened to any of my hardware.

 

[compuwar]

How damaging is an improper shutdown to a mac? ie can this have permanent 'pysical' damage to your computer & hardware, or does it just have a chance of messing up your files, until you repair disc or permittions, or reinstall the OS? unless of course you have done hardware and disc verification and all has passed?

its just ive had to do a few improper shutdowns though no fault of my own and i wanted some peace of mind!

many thanks!!

Worst-case for any modern OS with a journaling filesystem is disk corruption that makes the OS unbootable, requiring a reinstall. That's ok though, you have a backup, right? Journaling filesystems help somewhat in that you should only have to repair the FS on boot if things aren't quite right, but thats not the biggest risk.

 

[Eraserhead]

It can damage the HD afaik by causing the reader to touch the disk, but I think modern hard drives have capacitors/batteries so the reader can be locked in place first.

 

[swordfish86]

AGGH!!!
i was away last night, and my other-half thought it would be a good idea to turn off my mac for me, altough her idea of doing this is holding down the power button till it turns off rather than doing a normal shutdown i gave her a telling off and im sure she will do it properly next time.

But im really worried about it now, can this have done any damage?
i have ran cocktail pilot, repair permittions, verify disc ect ect is there anything alse you guys can reccomend?
everything seems fine i just hate it wen it hapens!
thanks

 

[gauchogolfer]

You might try booting into single-user mode and running fsck, just to fix any errors.

 

[synth3tik]

You might try booting into single-user mode and running fsck, just to fix any errors.

although unless someone is rather Mac-savvy I would not suggest running Single user as there is the ability to really mess things up.

 

[gauchogolfer]

although unless someone is rather Mac-savvy I would not suggest running Single user as there is the ability to really mess things up.

I'm not particularly *nix-savvy myself, so I fsck and reboot right back into regular old OS X as fast as I can.

 

[IJ Reilly]

I'm not sure what the OP means by "improper shutdown" but presumably we're talking about holding down the power button or disconnecting from the AC or some such.

Yes, this can certainly cause damage, and no, it should not require reinstallation of the OS. Shutting down in a disorderly way can cause the hard drive catalog to become corrupted. This does not heal on its own and can lead to serious problems, such as an unbootable Mac. I highly recommend running fsck in Single User Mode or booting on the restore disk and running Disk Utility any time your Mac was not shut down correctly.