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What maintenance should be done after an unexpected shutdown our power outage?

Dankk

Diamond Member
The thread title pretty much says it all. After an unexpected shut down (such as from a hard crash) or a power outage, what kind of maintenance should be done to make sure nothing as been damaged or corrupted (regarding both software and hardware)? Should I run a disk check, etc?

I'm using Windows 7 by the way.
 
When the OS properly shuts down it sets a clean shutdown flag. The next time it boots if it doesn't see that clean shutdown flag it will automatically run scandisk. IOW, you don't need to do anything but if you want to be "sure" nothing is corrupted then you have to check any files you (app) or the OS might have been writing or caching to write at the time which is usually guesswork and too tedious, and sometimes an impossible process to bother with... though if you had a particular office document open or were composing an email, etc, just open the app and check what it sees.

What happens can be random and may not make any sense. Once when I had an outtage, I wasn't running a defrag or anything at the time but when the system was later used, after a few days I started noticing (with no other system changes of any kind) graphics driver related bluescreen crashes. I went into add/remove programs to uninstall the driver and oddly it wouldn't even do that, it stated files were missing. I then installed the exact same driver (version and installer file copy) and it fixed the problems and allowed uninstalling from add/remove programs too.

Best advice - if the system is important, get an UPS for it and install the software to automatically shut it down, and test that it works as intended.
 
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Thanks for the help guys. I always run a disk check on my main SSD after a power outage just to make sure.
 
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