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[Astral]

My job would be roughly 60% easier if people actually rebooted before calling. But they keep me having a job, at least.

Which is why everyone in tech support should have this hung up in their cubes:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

I actually have this one:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

But that works too. Problem being some of the computers the companies that hire us to provide support have can take 10-15 minutes to reboot, which we are required to say something every 45 seconds for. I really despite how nitpicky the QA rules have become. The idiots calling would be amazed how much I consult Google using the words they've provided me.

I tell you, if I got paid every time I heard "I'm not a computer/IT/iPad person" I'd probably be only marginally less poor than I am now.

[Bohandas]

I've problems that have gotten worse from rebooting. My old laptop locked up while going into hibernate mode one time so I turned it off and turned it back on; completely hosed the file allocation table. Had to replace the hard drive.

(It was years ago but I've still got that drive because I heard there was a way one could get to do basic data recovery at home with equipment that one might be able to find at a computer store with a little shopping around. I never got the details of that though. Does anyone know?)

[aristabulus]

I've problems that have gotten worse from rebooting. My old laptop locked up while going into hibernate mode one time so I turned it off and turned it back on; completely hosed the file allocation table. Had to replace the hard drive.

(It was years ago but I've still got that drive because I heard there was a way one could get to do basic data recovery at home with equipment that one might be able to find at a computer store with a little shopping around. I never got the details of that though. Does anyone know?)

Get a HDD enclosure that will play nice with the drive, and plug it into a working computer... see what happens.  I've got a couple decent iMicro dual type enclosures, they do both IDE and SATA.  Even if the drive is hosed, the enclosure is useful gear to have on-hand.

Because of how laptops are, they suffer heat related damage faster, and more severely.  Not much that can be done about it, just know the early warning signs and replace while you can still clone the old drive.

[Muz]

Haha, even in this Windows 10 era you still solve problems by rebooting stuff.

[Toaster]

Haha, even in this Windows 10 era you still solve problems by rebooting stuff.

Windows... Windows never changes.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

although really it's usually an application or driver problem and not the OS.  Plus there are several things that can be fixed in other ways that a reboot will do for you.

[Shadowlord]

I've problems that have gotten worse from rebooting. My old laptop locked up while going into hibernate mode one time so I turned it off and turned it back on; completely hosed the file allocation table. Had to replace the hard drive.

(It was years ago but I've still got that drive because I heard there was a way one could get to do basic data recovery at home with equipment that one might be able to find at a computer store with a little shopping around. I never got the details of that though. Does anyone know?)

For me it seems like if I hard reboot after Windows froze on me, it just loves to FUBAR sdb.dat and spam the error log, even with a brand new hard drive, and running chkdsk /f doesn't fix it. (Deleting it after rebooting did, though! Apparently it wasn't important. I couldn't find jack shit about how to fix it or what it even did.)

I even turned off write caching to stop it from happening again, but apparently when I upgraded to windows 10, it helpfully turned it back on, so it FUBAR'd it again a month ago or two ago.

If what you did was "hose the file allocation table" (since it shouldn't normally be possible to damage the drive physically by rebooting) there's a backup table on the drive. If you broke windows, that's different of course but looking at it in another computer could be expected to work if the drive is still OK. Normally chkdsk could fix it. Depending on the size of the drive, it could take a while.

Expensive specialized recovery equipment is for trying to recover stuff directly off the platters if it's been erased or physically damaged, and that's expensive (and you shouldn't need it). You just need to be able to connect the drive to a computer and run chkdsk /f on it and see if it fixes what's wrong.

[miauw62]

Physically damaging a drive by rebooting is very possible. I once completely broke a drive because an unfortunate hard reboot broke the read/write head.

[Shadowlord]

That's amazing.

[BFEL]

Holy shit this is still going

The best part of my story is after fixing this issue I STILL ended up getting an entirely new computer THE SAME DAY anyway because the last one was shit that couldn't play Fallout 4

[Toaster]

Physically damaging a drive by rebooting is very possible. I once completely broke a drive because an unfortunate hard reboot broke the read/write head.

I killed two hard drives in two weeks by power outages.  I've used a UPS ever since; do recommend.

[GentlemanRaptor]

I lost a laptop hard drive due to what may have been physical damage, but I am convinced that what actually killed it was a possessed DF save from the Deathgate/Murdermachines fort. There was a string of suspicious technological failures among the overseers of that game, and the fact that the save was basically the embodiment of corruption in the end doesn't help my suspicions.

(Only mostly joking. We called the corruption in the save file Terry.)

[i2amroy]

Physically damaging a drive by rebooting is very possible. I once completely broke a drive because an unfortunate hard reboot broke the read/write head.

FWIW this is becoming exceptionally unlikely to happen in modern drives (not even considering the fact that more and more of us are using solid state now, where it's impossible ). Pretty much every drive nowadays has the ability to harness the rotational energy of the disk turning to provide enough power to move the needle over off of the drive platter in the event of a power outage, meaning the only real times this can happen is if you have a power outage right as the disk is just first spinning up to write something or slowing down to a stop already.

[BFEL]

So er, update on BFEL's ability to successfully Steam.

It is currently gone for unknown reasons.

Specifically I keep clicking the icon to bring up Steam but it won't bring up steam.

Same thing happens with ALL MY GODDAMN GAMES FROM STEAM, WHICH IS LIKE ALL MY GAMES GUYS.

HELP.

Also I already tried rebooting but it didn't work this time.

[scrdest]

Rebooting the OS or Steam?

[Akura]

Code: [Select]

Task Manager -> Steam.exe -> RMB -> End Process -> ??? -> Profit?!
                                   |
                                  \./
                              No Steam.exe? -> Reboot -> Try again -> ??? -> Profit?!
                                                                            |
                                                                           \./
                                                                       No working? -> ??? -> PROFIT! ¯\_(ツ)_/¯