What happens if you turn a computer off while it says not to turn it off?
In: Technology
Worse case? Corrupt the OS system files and you have to re-install Windows.
The hard drive spins while working. Interrupting it by shutting down and it might forget what it was doing. Imagine being told to finish a project right now and you weren’t done yet but close to it.. super close. Then someone says stop, doesn’t matter and pulls your project
It depends but usually nothing too bad.
Most processes that prompt this kind of message can be recovered from terminating abruptly if the process was well-designed. The software will journal its progress and if it fails or is interrupted, will be able to roll back its incomplete changes. Most OS updates are like this. This is usually followed by another long-running “don’t shut off your power” process at next boot when it cleans up and checks system files.
Some processes really don’t take this well, though.
Power loss when running something that modifies the filesystems or partitions on disk can result in data loss or a system that won’t boot. Power loss while updating firmware is very bad. While some fancier devices keep a firmware backup, this is rare and without it, the device can be very hard to repair.
At the end of the day, it’s going to depend on what kind of operations are being done and how much care has been taken to make failures recoverable.
Updates often have changes for operating system files. If the PC should lose power, some files may only be partially saved, causing system corruption, and potentially destroying the software. In such a situation, your only option may be to completely wipe the hard drive (losing all your saved information) and reinstalling the entire operating system completely. Do yourself a favor and let the thing do the thing.
At that point, the computer is editing, saving or creating some critical files. And interrupting that can end up corrupting things.
Kinda like cleaning up but mid way through just stopping. Then wondering why later it’s not clean
You know those Choose Your Own Adventure books? A book where every page has part of the story and every so often you need to choose what to do. And when you’ve chosen the book tells you to go to that page to continue?
Now you get a new bundle of pages by mail. It says “To make your book better, follow do this!”. And it tells you to correct this word. Move this page to there and change this number on that page. What happens when you stop? When you go to sleep and forgot?
The next day you read your book. You start on page 1 and go on an adventure. Most of the times you don’t notice anything, the bundle made changes to the evil storyline, the one you never read. But sometimes the story doesn’t make sense. You try to enter the Royal Hall and suddenly you’re in A Dark Cave. And sometimes you stopped when changing something very important: maybe you ripped out the first page and didn’t replace it. Now your book is broken.
As others said, now we know people often break their books when changing them so the bundles now include clever things so they don’t break as often. One of them is a big fat warning “Don’t go to sleep, stupid!”, another inserts a new page 1: “You went to sleep, stupid! Finish what you started! AND CHECK EVERYTHING TWICE!”. (This page is removed when everything is finished)
Computers have several ways to “remember” things (store information). One is what computer uses when it’s turned on, were it does calculations and runs different applications. You probably heard that computers can do billions of operations per second, and for that they need to be able to access a lot of data, very fast, without unnecessary delays. All this is done in memory called Random Access Memory (RAM). Unfortunately, making memory fast means it’s very expensive to manufacture, which limits how much you can store there. And the way such memory is made fast for truly random access creates a very severe disadvantage – it “forgets” everything if power is turned off. That is where another type of memory comes to help – long term memory based on various technologies such as hard drives, SSDs and other flash memories, magnetic tapes, or even cloud storage. All that other memory is too slow for a processor to use directly.
Various programs that you run on your computer have different needs for this long term storage. Some, like games, only read most of the time. Except when you change settings or make a progress that needs to be saved. Other programs, like a video editor, would need to both read and write quite a lot. But remember, in computer’s terms accessing that memory is very slow, therefore computers try to avoid doing that as much as possible. One way to speed things up is when applications don’t write all they have to disk immediately, but wait for the user to “save changes”. Another technique is to use “disk cache” – where part of RAM is used to store data that needs to be written to the long term storage so that applications writing that data “think” it’s all written down and can get on with the main tasks at hand. The Operating System (Windows in your case) would then write that data from the cache to the permanent location, slowly, as a background operation. There is a logic behind when the OS decides to start writing that data, it depends on how full the cache is and tries to prioritize user’s experience to make work with the computer feel smooth and fast.
Sometimes, when a user decides to shut down the computer, the disk cache is not yet empty. That means that there is still data in RAM that is not yet put into permanent storage and would be lost if power is turned off. Whatever that data is depends on usage of the computer prior to shut down. You might end up with game save to be gone. Or it might be that nothing will be lost because it was some telemetry of the OS or log files of the apps that would not get written down, stuff that you don’t need anyway. But something will be lost, therefore better wait and let the OS shut down gracefully.
you will very likely lose data.
if this happens during a major system update and the system gets interrupted while changing a critical file , thole OS might become Corrupted.
what’s happening there is that programs that are running are saving data and if you turn it off before they are done you’ll get file system corruption and possibly lose data.
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