Rebooting NT

There is no appearant effect on the computer for doing this. You may find that systems running a FAT drive may have to verify the drive upon reboot but if the partitions are NTFS then you should be fine.

Hi,

As long as the hard disk isn't physically writing when the machine is powered down, then the filesystem should be ok.

Powering down a running machine (rather than safely shutting down) always carries some risk, although is relatively low for NTFS.

Its pretty common practice, but I'd still encourage your users to wait a bit and see if it recovers by itself.

But sometimes resetting it is the only option you've got!

Cheers,
Tim.

This will very rarely cause trouble to an NTFS file system. Fat is the opposite, it will very rarely NOT cause trouble (counting even small thinks like lost clusters - which can almost always be repaired by scandisk- as trouble that is).

However as a general rule you may want to create your own "system" for keeping a check on users rebooting when they feel like it. I don't let my users shut off the system by any other means besides the "start -> shutdown" method without me knowing about it first. There are two exception users to this rule who are non-MIS, but they only got that "exception status" after they proved a level of competence in how PC file systems work with Windows based computers. The majority of my user base (95%) are little more than data-entry/customer service reps....I like the people I work with by when most of your users fill entry level ($8-$12/hr) positions they generally aren't well versed in technology.

I agree with others that you should be OK, although we all know it's really not a good idea. NT normally doesn't freeze up very much, so if it happens often my advice would be to try to figure out what's causing it (misbehaving drivers or software)and remedy the cause. Hope this helps!

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