This
reminds me, a warning to those of you using Windows 2000. There is a known
problem with windows 2K on faster machines, during shut down the machine
can
power off before the disk cache has been fully flushed. This results in a
corrupt registry file and therefore an unusable machine. This happened to
me
last week as my UPS shut down my windows 2k machine during a power cut, I
could
then no longer fire it up and had to reinstall windows. This was the first
time
since I built the machine that it has ever been shut down (I usually just
do a
restart) so I had never encountered this problem before. This is supposed
to be
fixed in the SP2 for win2k when it comes out but until then the solution
for
deliberately shutting down windows is to do a restart then power off as the
machine starts to reboot (during the POST). Of course this is not possible
when
UPS does the shut down so I have now disabled the automatic shut down by my
UPS.
It seems better to just let the juice run out than to shut the machine
down. I
don’t know if this affects all motherboards and hard disks etc but it
certainly
happened on my Abit KT7, 1Ghz Athlon, Promise controller, ATA 100 disks
(all
IBM from memory). Believe me, reinstalling win2k is not something you want
to
do!
There
does
now appear to be a fix on the Microsoft site but I have not tried it
yet:
http://support.microsoft.com/support/kb/articles/q260/2/33.asp
Regards
Graham