OT: Computer's...gotta hate 'em.

[Thermodyne]

Imperator Fyron said:



OSes shouldn't be managing boot files willy-nilly during the normal shutdown process... The boot files don't need to change unless you change your hardware or kernel files, which certainly doesn't happen every time you are running the OS. That's just asking for trouble, and definitely a Windows flaw if true.

Note that he never said he was turning it off while shutting down, but rather while booting up. Killing the bootup early on isn't an issue, since all its doing is reading data and building up RAM files. Perhaps not good due to mild stress on the drive, but definitely not going to kill Windows at this point.

The reason that XP does this is so that it will restart after you make changes or add hardware. All Plug and Play OS’s need to overwrite the boot files at shut down. In the old days you had to write these files by hand. Sure it was more reliable, but it was beyond the abilities of most people. What he was doing is called bouncing the loader. If you happen to catch it at the wrong moment, you’ll end up with damaged files. If he had put a bootable floppy in the drive or a bootable OS like BartPC in the CD reader he would have gotten away with it in all likelihood.