A hard shutdown, does it do any damage ?

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In just looking for a definitive answer really, on a modern system does doing a hard shutdown via the power button cause any hardware or software damage ?

Sometimes you have no choice where you have to shutdown via the power button, obviously power cuts can do similar.
 
Hardware damage, nope don't think so.

Software - anything that's sitting in a buffer waiting to go to disk will be lost. Most of the time this will just be inconvenient, e.g. losing your open browser tabs. If it's a critical OS process though you could maybe end up with some corruption.
 
Never done me any damage either on laptop or desktop pc and I must do it at least once a day for as long as I can remember. In fact most days my son doesn't even shut down his desktop just flips the switch at the wall
 
Only way I can think of borking hardware would be mid bios/firmware update.

Software? I've corrupted windows doing it once, in something like 30 years when I yanked the wrong power cable mid install of a sp.
 
Hardware wise very unlikely unless something is on its last legs anyhow.

In 20 odds years of using computers I think I've managed to corrupt an OS installation once from it (easily recovered via the OS disc and sfc) and no instances of data loss that I'm aware of (not to say it hasn't happened).
 
As above, very unlikely to do any hardware damage, but any open files have a small risk of corruption. Also as stated, anything that's just in RAM or buffered and hasn't been committed to HDD storage would be lost. Basically save your stuff and you should be fine. Personally I always recommend to only do it if you really have to.
 
In just looking for a definitive answer really, on a modern system does doing a hard shutdown via the power button cause any hardware or software damage ?

Sometimes you have no choice where you have to shutdown via the power button, obviously power cuts can do similar.

You can certainly corrupt your file system or files. If you're really unlucky, you can corrupt something critical that might prevent your OS from booting. For instance you might break a RAID1 array and lose all your data or trash a drive's boot sector.

Hardware-wise it's a lot less likely, but you are potentially powering off hard drives that haven't had a chance to park their heads, though nowadays drives are pretty resilient to that sort of thing that would potentially damage hardware from a decade ago.

The only other proviso is that there are some occasions that could be catastrophic, such as losing power in the middle of a BIOS upgrade, that could render the hardware effectively dead. Most motherboard manufacturers have ways of recovering from that, and I've even seen similar system on Asus routers. I wouldn't like to try and fix a hard drive that had the power pulled in the middle of a firmware upgrade.

So in short, a hard reset is never recommended unless absolutely necessary. On a modern system there are too many other things going on in the background, being cached in memory, or being written down to storage without you knowing about it.

If you find you're doing it a lot because of system lockups or somesuch, you're best off finding the cause and fixing that, because sooner or later it will cause you a problem of one sort of another.
 
In just looking for a definitive answer really, on a modern system does doing a hard shutdown via the power button cause any hardware or software damage ?

Sometimes you have no choice where you have to shutdown via the power button, obviously power cuts can do similar.

I always just flick mine off at the socket, have done for years and I've never had an issue other than longer start up times where it tries to recover open windows/apps.
 
You can do it about 10 times on one machine...try it again after that it will blow up.

Not sure if serious. :p

I've done it loads of times unfortunately, usually due to failed overclocks and other things. I don't think it has caused any damage but then perhaps it has and I haven't noticed.

I did have a-lot of things wrong with my OS a while ago which meant I had to re-install, but I think that was probably due to a virus and other things.

People who turn the PC off by flicking the switch on the wall anoy me though. The shutdown button ws there for a reason.

Shutting a computer down is like telling it to go to sleep and letting it get on with it. Flicking the switch is like knocking it out with a brick. :p
 
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I've had to do it loads of times when I'm tweaking the miners and windows freezes up. Definitely would only do it if I had to, because I've had a corrupted OS from it as well.
 
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