Not sure what happened. Perfectly clear day here. No storms or whatnot otherwise I would save my work, shut down and manually disconnect my power cords. All seems to be fine (I have rebooted) but I likely lost my unsaved work (not important). I'll get a battery backup someday but my little Belkin power conditioning/trip circuit bar has to do for now.
 
It did get me thinking about these types of abrupt power losses, their effect on the hardware and data and how, aside from the obviously solution of owning a universal power supply (which avoids the problem altogether) people in the know cope/deal with/generally be SMRT about such things.
 
I just boot into Safe Mode first (at prompt) then reboot normally. This always seems to work just fine (and maybe booting normally these days is fine too). I just want to understand and learn and sponge up little tricks from people who know better... as always.
 
So... open thread on loss of power issues. Might be interesting and useful.
 
Cheers.

One day it might not work fine 
 
You should be running...
chkdsk (drive) /f
 
... for all your drives after an unscheduled shutdown....
 
Cheers!

BTW you only need to boot into safe mode if your machine won't start correctly for some reason, it won't do any repairs.... The other reason to boot into safe mode is to do a better scan for viruses.
 
This is also worth running periodically...
 
http://www.eightforums.com/tutorials/26512-dism-fixing-component-store-corruption-windows-8-a.html
 
... and backup regularly!
 

Hi, Alex. Just for in thread reference...
 
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CHKDSK
 
Curious what the /f is for (would we not be pointing to C then E and then whatever is left on the system?)
 
Obviously I have no clue about this crap.

Yeah, the important stuff gets backed up and starter images are in place.
 
Now I gotta wonder if the extra money I spent on my fancy Coolermaster PSU might help ease the sheer shock of such power losses to the other hardware compared to perhaps the lower quality $20 PSUs.
 
Either way all seems to be well. I just like reading about stuff like this.

FYI I changed #3 to a better link.
 
For chkdsk:
http://www.tekrevue.com/tip/how-to-scan-fix-hard-drives-with-chkdsk-in-windows-8/
 
Cheers Beep...
 
 

Thanks, Alex.
 
You know me. As I stumble my dirty little bleeples into various conundrums and pontifications I figure we might as well discuss it here. It always ends up with some great info and convo.
 
I seem to be alright with this recent blackout (still don't know WTF it was but I'm guessing dum dum landlord crap) but this does seem like a useful topic to archive and discuss on the forum. I wonder what some of our resident DAW builders have to say on the subject.
 
Cheers.

Def would run chkdsk at least. Very good chance you have corruption althoughit might not appear critical until after several more outages...

Just backup first in case it uncovers serious corruption. I run chkdsk and defrag once a
month as part of general maintenance...

And sfc maybe twice a year.

Ta.

Of interest too is what happens if you are in the middle of recording and you get a power failure. How much of the audio files will you have once you get going again. I believe Pro Tools will have the audio up the point of the power failure but many other DAW's erase everything you have recorded so far and there will be nothing.
 
I am only thinking of that amazing solo you just did before the power failure!
 
sfc is very good too. Sometimes when you run this it will repair damaged system files and get your machine back in order. Not a bad thing to run regularly a couple of times a year as Doktor Avalanche suggests. I started getting some slightly weird behavior after some bad shutdowns and once I ran this everything went back to normal and being solid.

While I don't think it is as bad as it used to be, you should watch out for power shock damage to your motherboard and RAM. Also, If a drive is writing at the time of the power loss, the disk itself can be physically damaged (scratched, really).
 
A UPS costs between $200-400, depending on power needs and desired runtime. Compared to the cost of a new PC, or even having to replace parts, I think it's a no brainer. Either that or move to a laptop
 
Regards,
Dan