any physical damage caused by system crashes?

[j0j081]

This is a pretty noobish question but when your system crashes from overclocking, a bad driver, or just general instability what are the chances of any physical damage being done to your hardware? I guess a good example of what I'm thinking of would be the hard drive. Does the pc locking up/suddenly shutting down cause it any issues? I know if you are unlucky your data could be corrupted but that isn't really physical damage that can't be fixed.

 

[VirtualLarry]

Generally, no, system crashes don't cause hardware damage, but conversely, hardware damage can lead to system crashes. Which the user, in post-mortem analysis, may (often incorrectly) determine that the system crash was the cause of the hardware failure, rather than the other way around.

 

[aigomorla]

a random crash means something wasnt playing right.

most of the time if it reboots back into bios, it was software related due to your overclocking. (however it could still be memory related)

So reboot and check, if she boots up fine, then a software glitched your explorer and crashed.

If you overheated your cpu and crashed, thats another story, but most chips have a themal protection which saves them from melthing though your motherboard like the old AMD chips used to do.

So nah, if you crashed, find out why you crashed. Its probably your overclocking isnt steady.

 

[Denithor]

Really depends on what caused the crash.

If lightning struck your house and your computer was plugged directly into the wall socket (unprotected rig FTL!) then it could easily be hosed.

If a PSU burned out it could look like a "system crash" - instant power down - and it can take a lot out with it (they don't always end with a flash/bang/puff of smoke to tell you what happened).

If a memory stick went bad and your system starts randomly freezing you may experience data corruption but nothing unrecoverable (except, obviously the memory stick itself).

And so on, ad nauseum.

If it's just Windows acting the fool then no, hardware generally isn't affected or damaged.

 

[Peter Trend]

I understand it's generally a bad thing for the data on your hard drive too, as Windows normally does a few things before shutting down, e.g. it marks some sectors as free, which would otherwise become unusable (or something like that) and writes anything in memory to HDD. Use CheckDisk to minimise this problem.

http://cquirke.mvps.org/9x/baddata.htm
http://www.ehow.com/how_447135...luster-hard-drive.html

"Unless the cause is a crash that deviates from sane file management, these situations will corrupt data by interrupting sane file system operations. The only damage you should see are:

* Incorrect free space count
* Lost cluster chains
* Possible incorrect file lengths"

 

[Peter Trend]

Oh sorry, I suppose that doesnt quite count as hardware...depends how you look at it. It's definitely detrimental to your system though!

 

[j0j081]

yeah just pisses me off because I had a couple system crashes due to a bad video card driver right after I installed my new hard drive. Before that I hadn't had a crash in like 6 months.