9 Sep
2012
9 Sep
'12
3:45 p.m.
On Sun, Sep 09, 2012 at 12:03:38PM -0400, Dave McGuire wrote:
On 09/09/2012 11:27 AM, Liam Proven wrote:
I taught people to do Ctrl-Alt-Del and wait for the BIOS screen,
*then* power off.
Umm...did MS-DOS hook that interrupt and tell smartdrv to flush its
buffers? I don't recall it having done so. If it didn't, that practice
did absolutely nothing. (sorry)
Not sure about MS-DOS & smartdrv, but IIRC the hyperdsk cache (which I
used instead of smartdrv) did indeed hook Ctrl-Alt-Del to flush the caches
before reboot. It also some more special hotkeys for things like "flush
caches now" or "switch cache to write-through" which where quite handy
when
testing potentially crashy software - like stuff you've just compiled ;-)
> 3.10 also installed SMARTDRV, (misconfigured to
enable write cacheing,
> altered write sequence, and return to DOS prompt without first writing the
> buffers).
I was always careful, trained my clients to be, and never had a problem.
Careful would not protect you if you had a disk write error during delayed
writes (you were slightly lucky), but it WOULD NOT protect you from
turning off the machine before writes after it came back to the prompt on
exiting a program. "I'm DONE! SAVE. EXIT. At the prompt? Hit the power
switch!" Agood reason for implementing the "shutdown procedure"! Yeah. That's sorta analogous to people
preferring IDE because it's
"simpler" because it "doesn't need all those silly terminators and
stuff". It actually DID need terminators...but they were never
implemented due to a stellar combination of cheapness and cluelessness.
*urk*
Don't remind me of IDE (or PATA as it is called nowadays). There were good
reasons why the first machine I bought with my own money was a pure SCSI
machine, including optical drives. And I stuck with SCSI until a few years
ago when I started using SATA disks for bulk storage and workstation disks.
The root disk of the server and $HOME are still sitting on SCSI (and RAID1
at that), though.
Kind regards,
Alex.
--
"Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and
looks like work." -- Thomas A. Edison