System Shutdown

[Nizamudeen H]

Can any one tell me why we need to shutdown our PC in 3 steps like Start ---->power ---->Shutdown instead of Power off system directly , I seen the video in You can't able to get...could you please explain anyone clearly. Thanks

 

 

[A1200]

You don't want to be writing to the filesystem when the power goes down, this causes corruption. "But I wasn't doing anything when I turned the power off" but look at your hdd activity light - all modern os's are constantly reading/writing - swap files, logs, scans etc. That's why. You don't need to do three steps, you can make sure your power button is configured to shutdown (instead of sleep or hibernate), and a tap of that will do the same job as the three stages you describe. Don't press and hold the power button in this scenario though or it will do a force shutdown as per the ATX standard.

[Oshino Shinobu]

It gives the system time to finish anything it's currently doing before shutting down. If you just cut power, anything in a volatile cache will be lost, write jobs may be halfway finished, causing data and/or system corruption. 

[Master Disaster]

The basic explanation is that the Kernel is very complex and has lots of different read/write processes happening all of the time. While its pretty unlikely these days (since we have write back caching) it is possible that just killing the power might interrupt the Kernel while its in the middle of writing to a critical system file, this would corrupt the file entirely and cause the system to crash the next time you power it on.

 

These days its much more complicated than that with all the different ACPI states.

[Mark Kaine]

3 hours ago, Master Disaster said:

The basic explanation is that the Kernel is very complex and has lots of different read/write processes happening all of the time. While its pretty unlikely these days (since we have write back caching) it is possible that just killing the power might interrupt the Kernel while its in the middle of writing to a critical system file, this would corrupt the file entirely and cause the system to crash the next time you power it on.

 

These days its much more complicated than that with all the different ACPI states.

in my case it's always "Steam shutting down..." 

[LogicalDrm]

-> Moved to Windows

***

 

You can make direct shortcut for shutting down PC. But as said, it will still be controlled shutdown to previous corruption and stuff.

 

Am I old if I kinda miss when you need to physically power system off.