Jeff Liebermann wrote in
news
On Wed, 7 Oct 2009 19:08:06 +0000 (UTC), bz
wrote:

Jeff Liebermann wrote in
m:

That only happens with FAT and FAT32. NTFS has a journaling
filesystem:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USN_Journal
which does not require a fsck if the user or battery protection
circuit suddenly pulls the plug.

However, an unscheduled shutdown during an update to the directory (or
other vital) sectors does seem to be one cause of 'file xxxx.xxx not
found' BSOD computers that are brought to me to fix.

I don't that very often, usually because I tend to do pre-emptive
replacements of hard disks (based on various criteria ranging from
S.M.A.R.T. reports to Ouigi board warnings). When I do see it, the
hard disk is usually ready to fail. Unfortunately, it tends to trash
files that Windoze like to scibble to constantly (i.e. the registry).

disfortunately, the grad-student owned machines only get brought to my
attention when they are infested or crashed.
(one machine had over 50,000 virus infected files! "My machine is running
slow.")
Budget and personnel restraints prevent us from doing regular PM on most
state owned machines.
However, as part of my normal 'virus clean up' (often backup data,
reformat, reinstall OS is the fastest and safest method) I do check the
hard drives for signs of impending failure.

Also, some software that claims to speed up the machine turns on HD
write-caching. Bad idea.
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,1819756,00.asp
Worse are PATA and SATA drives with a large (32MB) cache on the HD.
These do cache writes and will trash anything left un-flushed in the
cache if the power fails. Moral: the bigger they are, the harder
they crash.

Same with pulling the plug on USB, eSATA, and FireWire external
drives. Lots of ways to trash data, all of which apply equally to
FAT32. Despite these and other possible problems, NTFS journaling is
a major improvement over FAT32 and should be used whenever possible.

Agreed, although one of my cow-orker swears by the latest EFTn file system.





--
bz 73 de N5BZ k

please pardon my infinite ignorance, the set-of-things-I-do-not-know is an
infinite set.