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