Welcome to the MacNN Forums.

swordfish86 · Feb 9, 2007, 04:23 PM

How damaging is an improper shutdown to a mac? ie can this have permanent 'pysical' damage to your computer & hardware, or does it just have a chance of messing up your files, until you repair disc or permittions, or reinstall the OS? unless of course you have done hardware and disc verification and all has passed?

its just ive had to do a few improper shutdowns though no fault of my own and i wanted some peace of mind!

many thanks!!

Big Mac · Feb 9, 2007, 05:06 PM

It's not that damaging to modern Macs, given that OS X now has journaling features. You may want to run fsck/Disk Utility or Disk Warrior just to check things out, but it's not something you need to worry much about.

reader50 · Feb 9, 2007, 05:28 PM

It will not damage your hardware. The directory tree could be damaged on your hard drives if they were active at the time. The system will repair the boot drive on the next startup, but to my knowledge it doesn't autocheck any other drives.

Like Big Mac said, run Disk Utility on your drives for peace of mind. Note that live checking the boot drive isn't reliable, to do a proper check of the regular boot drive, you need to boot from a different location. Like the OSX Install disk.

peeb · Feb 9, 2007, 05:46 PM

You can fsck things up a bit in the sense that files may not be fully saved in applications, external drives might be left in a slightly confused state. If you do it by accident every now and again it's not too bad, but don't make a habit of it, sooner or later you will get some data loss.

swordfish86 · Feb 26, 2007, 02:01 PM

AGGH!!!
i was away last night, and my other-half thought it would be a good idea to turn off my mac for me, altough her idea of doing this is holding down the power button till it turns off rather than doing a normal shutdown

i gave her a telling off

and im sure she will do it properly next time.

But im really worried about it now, can this have done any damage?
i have ran cocktail pilot, repair permittions, verify disc ect ect is there anything alse you guys can reccomend?
everything seems fine i just hate it wen it hapens!
thanks

reader50 · Feb 26, 2007, 03:51 PM

If no errors were found during the disk verify, then you are fine. At worst, you may have lost unsaved changes in any documents you had open.

Macs are much less susceptible to this sort of issue than Windows systems. Unless further problems turn up, don't worry about it.

peeb · Feb 27, 2007, 01:51 PM

Don't worry about it. Try not to do it, but Macs are pretty good at dealing with this. Really unlikely to have lost data, even unsaved changes are probably preserved. Not worth jeopardizing your relationship for!