How badly can a hard shutdown(holding down the power button till the comp turns off) damage your computer?

Question

I have only done a hard shutdown once since ive gotten my computer. What kind of damage will it do to my computer? I have heard many people say its ok to do it and some have said it can ruin your hard disk or operating system. I would greatly appreciate the help.

Answer 1

It can corupt your OS, damage your HDD either physicaly or screw up a section of data if you do it when it's reading/writing to a paticular sector.

It's best not to do this unless you have no other option.

I work in IT and have seen these problems happen.

Answer 2

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RE:
How badly can a hard shutdown(holding down the power button till the comp turns off) damage your computer?
I have only done a hard shutdown once since ive gotten my computer. What kind of damage will it do to my computer? I have heard many people say its ok to do it and some have said it can ruin your hard disk or operating system. I would greatly appreciate the help.

Answer 3

badly hard shutdownholding power button comp turns damage computer

Answer 4

I use it all the time, and I've never had a problem.

I suppose that if something is being written to the hard disk when it actually conks out, you might lose that particular bit of data (or corrupt the file that it's a part of), but as you only usually use that button when the computer has crashed, that's fairly unlikely to happen.

On the one hand, they're not going to put a button on the computer that damages it. On the other hand, if you've got an important document open at the time, and it starts to autosave just as the power cuts off, I guess you could lose it. But that's only a guess.

I certainly wouldn't be scared of using it if you need to.

Answer 5

starting with win95, even if you shut down the computer by holding the on/off button down, windows does a system shutdown (that's why it takes 6 seconds to turn off) so no damage. even if you unplug it or have a power bump the chances of damage is small. the only thing really effected would be any data that wasn't saved.

Answer 6

With Windows running allways use the windows shutdown button and only use the "hard" power button if Windows says it is OK to shut down. Don't confuse this with the message "preparing to shut down". It is possible to corrupt system files, registry entries, drive allocation tables etc. that may be in the process of getting updated. You system may not boot properly upon reboot, there will be no hardware damage.

If Windows is not running it is safe to use the "hard" power button any time.

Added,
Unless you like risking loading the OS over again, don't listen to the many people on this post that say this is OK to do. It is not a good idea unless the system is totally not responding to any commands.

Answer 7

It can't physically damage the hard drive as easily as it could in the early computer days, but it can cause data corruption, especially now with hard drive caching. What this means is you go to file, Save to save a document, it might not save for a minute or so, so if you shut down by simply cutting off power, your files may not be saved.

Answer 8

only do this if you cannot shutdown any other way (control-alt-delete does nothing)

It might mess up some files if they are in the middle of writing them.

When you do this, the next time you turn it on, you will
probably have to wait for a disk check to finish.
This takes longer than shutting down normally.

try to avoid it.

Answer 9

In short, you can make your computer not bootable. If you do it do Windows, you can corrupt operating system files and keep it from turning on. There is a shutdown option for a reason.

Answer 10

Well, I've done it more times than I can remember ...and to be honest my computer is crap. It freezes all the time and does other random stuff. I don't know if it's because of this or maybe I have some major viruses. If I was you, I'd remain shutting it down the proper way.

Answer 11

The answer really depends on how you have your computer configured. In general, it will not physically harm your computer. However, it is possible that you will lose data.

1) If you have not changed the basic default configuration of the computer, then pushing the power button quickly will just invoke the shutdown sequence and shut the computer down normally, or put the computer in standby, or even hibernate depending on your power button settings.

2) However, pushing the power button and holding it for several seconds is nearly the same as yanking the power cord out of the back. This is a bit more dangerous.

When you shut the computer down in this fashion, you are shutting it down, dirty. Files that were open at the time, will usually be lost. Databases, documents, spreadsheets, etc., that were open may or may not be corrupt depending on whether the process was idle or the system was actively writing data to the database. If a write operation was underway, then the data will be corrupt, since it will have only partially been written when the computer was silenced.

Many applications read and write to the registry continuously while the application is open. If your system is writing to the registry when power is interrupted by either pushing and holding the power button, yanking the cord out of the back, or even a real power failure, the system registry may become corrupt, and the system will not boot again, until the OS is reinstalled.

In past years, few home users had computers with RAID. But with the advent of SATA, RAID is very much affordable and many off-the-shelf computers include it in the default configuration. An instant shutdown, by holding down the power button, will usually trash the hard drives, when using a RAID configuration. For a complete discussion of RAID, go here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAID

The best answer is, unless the computer is provably absolutely totally idle, or locked up so tight that it cannot be shutdown any other way, holding the power button down to shutdown the computer "instantly" should be avoided.