Will a hard resets damage my computer?

satchmosays

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Jun 5, 2011
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Hey guys,


Just recently my computer went to sleep and when I woke it back up I wasn't getting signal to they keyboard, mouse, or monitor.

I tried pressing the reset button and It seemed to reset but still no signals.

Tried pressing the power button to see it if would just shut itself down, nothing happened.

So I did a forced shutdown (held the power button down) and turned it off and then turned it back on.

My fear is that I damaged the hardware or software on the computer. Can anyone give some input on this? I would appreciate it.

Thanks
 

striker410

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I don't think so. The only way you could damage the OS or software was if you pulled the plug when it was copying important files. Even then it might be able to recover.

Nowadays, there's capacitors or batteries on the motherboard that power the system for just long enough to safely shut itself down. There is very little chance you broke anything.

What were you doing before the computer went to sleep?
 
If your computer was in sleep mode everything had already been suspended to the hard drive anyway so its very unlikely that anything was mid transfer when you killed the power. If something were corrupted it might just be that your word doc has some random webdings in the middle or windows might end up with a bad file(unlikely), its very uncommon for pulling the plug to lead to anything bad.
 

satchmosays

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Jun 5, 2011
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Is there any way to find out if I have bad files?
 
They wouldnt find any bad files, scandisk checks the disk itself for bad sectors and defrag just moves stuff around


Honestly, i would be totally surprised if you did find a corrupted file, i have done hard shut downs on computers dozens of times and never had an issue so i wouldnt worry about it at all.
 

satchmosays

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Jun 5, 2011
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Thanks, sounds like everything is good.

Just for future reference though, if I did encounter corrupted files would I have to do a reformat and installation of Windows to repair them?