9 Sep
2012
9 Sep
'12
9:03 a.m.
On 09/09/2012 11:27 AM, Liam Proven wrote:
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"!
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)
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.
But to be fair, lots of OSs had problems if you turned
off without
shutting down. It's just that MS-DOS was so rudimentary that it didn't
/have/ a shutdown procedure and so users weren't accustomed to this.
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.
-Dave
--
Dave McGuire, AK4HZ
New Kensington, PA