Does holding down the power button damage your drives?

[Lysander]

As per the topic title, I'm having some trouble with Vista. Sometimes it hangs when shutting down and the only way to turn the computer off is to hold down the power button. I must have done this about 10-20 times in the last few months. But does doing this damage the drives/other hardware in any way?

 

[tom_e]

the only way it would do any damage to your drives is if there is data being written to them, it could then corrupt the data being written or the data already on your drives

 

[semi-pro waster]

Not that I am aware of, you are just forcing it to shut down because the normal shut down mechanisms have failed so it shouldn't matter.

 

[mosfet]

With NTFS, HFS(+) and EXT2/3 it shouldn't cause any problems, but a hard shut-down with FAT or other older file systems may cause problems, losing data and file system integrity.