[Techtalk] rebooting bad?

[Beth Johnson]

On Thu, 2002-08-22 at 18:01, Kathryn Andersen wrote:

> This apparently ensures that the head doesn't stick, because you've
> restarted the disk while it's still warm, thus ensuring that the gunk
> that might cause the head to stick to the disk, gets scraped off.
> And then it's safe to power down the disk.

Well, it's certainly not the head actually sticking to the disk!  A
particle of dust on the disk is enough to crash the heads.  The inside
of the hard drive is clean & sealed.

Now, the thermal stress is the greatest when the machine is warming up
after power on.  Like a light bulb that burns out when you turn it on
because the filament overheats, the computer components experience a
similar extreme stress.  It's not a warm reboot that's bad from the
hardware standpoint, but a cold one.  This is most likely what did in
Kathryn's drive.

And yes, a long uptime is really cool, but also could be a sign that
your kernel is really old!  ;-)

regards,
Beth
about to install a brand-spankin' new kernel
and remake my video drivers
-- 
  /\/\    Beth Johnson
 / o o\   Cosmic Wonderer
( / ^^\)  Springfield, MA USA
 \ M_M/   "Ruling a country is like cooking a small fish--
           you have to handle it with care."--Lao Tzu