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Earlier today someone in my house reset the power by flipping the power switches for the entire house on and off really fast. This resulted in my computer forcibly being shutdown. Since then I have restarted/rebooted my computer and everything seems to be just fine. I ran the chkdsk and sfc /verifyonly commands on my windows machine after restarting it and both commands indicated that there was nothing wrong with the filesystem, etc...

My computer uses a HDD (not SSD), my worry is that when the power forcibly got cut off some of my data could have been corrupted. Is it possibly that this could have caused some of my files to have been corrupted even if the files weren't opened/being edited at the time of the forcible shut down?

At the time of the shut down I only had Google Chrome open and a few Projects were open in Visual Studios, all projects in Visual Studio were saved before the shut down occurred so I'm hoping no data corruption/data loss occurred there.

Just browsing around my computer I can't seem to notice any missing files/corrupted files, so does that mean it's safe for me to assume that nothing bad happening and/or none of my files were effected by the shut down?

If I look in Event Viewer I can notice an event logged when the shut down occurred:

Event 41, Kernel-Power
The system has rebooted without cleanly shutting down first. This error could be caused if the system stopped responding, crashed, or lost power unexpectedly.

With the following event data

  BugcheckCode 0 
  BugcheckParameter1 0x0 
  BugcheckParameter2 0x0 
  BugcheckParameter3 0x0 
  BugcheckParameter4 0x0 
  SleepInProgress 0 
  PowerButtonTimestamp 0 
  BootAppStatus 0 
  Checkpoint 0 
  ConnectedStandbyInProgress false 
  SystemSleepTransitionsToOn 0 
  CsEntryScenarioInstanceId 0 
  BugcheckInfoFromEFI false 
  CheckpointStatus 0 
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  • If you had any documents open and were editing them, then yes, possible data loss, otherwise no.
    – Moab
    Feb 20, 2019 at 1:50

3 Answers 3

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You are very likely fine.

Hard drives are designed so they will NOT randomly write to the media upon a sudden power removal. (They include a tiny bit of energy storage onboard, enough to complete any currently-in-progress write operation, and enough to ensure a "clean" shutdown of the drive electronics.)

Your biggest concern would be the drive's write cache, but as long as you did NOT check the "Turn off Windows write-cache buffer flushing" option in the drive properties, Windows automatically flushed that cache within a few seconds after the last time anything tried to write to it.

By the way, the "event data" of all 0's means there's nothing to see. If the system had rebooted after a bugcheck (BSOD) then the BugcheckCode would NOT be 0, nor would many of the other fields, and you might have a minidump to look at. But that's not the case here.

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There is no need to worry, as their is no program in any OS to write anything on sudden power cut, their are only chance that your works are not saved but data corruption is not possible, any if by any chance it occurs you can recover that OS with last checkpoint.

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No need to worry, when Operating system would start a task, it will set a flag for it, when it finishes the flag will reset, if in the middle of any operation a failure(including power cut) happens, the operating system will find out in next start up and erase all unwanted writes. the only risk in this situation is that the hdd head shake for high voltage power current to hard disk from the power supply and damage the sector under it, it will probably cause a phenomena called bad-sector that means the only 512kb of that sector will not be accessible anymore, if that sector was in the middle of OS file, it may cause the windows crash with blue screen, and if it was in the middle of a file, that file may be corrupted (either reparable or not), by the way it will appear itself on the start up, just check your important files, its a very rare posiblity.

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