James Rich wrote:
On Thu, 26 Sep 2002, Michael Sinz wrote:
This sounds like the IDE-write cache does not flush before power off
problem. There is a "fix" to this in some systems that has the shutdown
process, after syncing/unmounting stuff do a powerdown of the IDE
drives to force them to write their caches before doing a shutdown
of the ATX power supply via APM/APCI.
Yes, this seems likely now. After disabling ACPI and APM I noticed a
message indicating that the IDE drives are being flushed. I don't think
this message was there before. Probably a problem with my dist. (I'm
using Slackware - I'll report it there).
Note that a message that says they are being flush does not mean that
they actually are - many (most) current IDE drives don't actually flush
or sync when you tell them unless you tell them to spin down/power off.
(At the drive level)
This is why many distros are now not only doing the flush/sync command
to the drives but then also doing a powerdown to the drives before
hitting the ATX power (APM/ACPI). Many others has significant loss
due to the power supply turning off faster than the drives had a chance
to write their 1M/2M/8M buffers back to disk.
--
Michael Sinz -- Director, Systems Engineering -- Worldgate Communications
A master's secrets are only as good as
the master's ability to explain them to others.
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