<div><span class="gmail_quote">On 7/11/07, <b class="gmail_sendername">Damian</b> <<a href="mailto:damian@gingermagic.co.uk">damian@gingermagic.co.uk</a>> wrote:</span>
<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="PADDING-LEFT: 1ex; MARGIN: 0px 0px 0px 0.8ex; BORDER-LEFT: #ccc 1px solid">I've started to have an idea about what's happened ..<br>Maybe something random failed (sound card?) which caused the computer to
<br>behave oddly, then the hard drive died because a file was copying over<br>the net when I shut the computer down.<br><br>I'll really have lost faith in Linux if that's what has happened. I lost<br>a hard drive to Linux a few months ago due to a power cut, and having
<br>the trouble now potentially because of shutting down while a file was<br>copying. I know neither of those two things are great, but I've had the<br>same countless times on windows machines and never had such dire<br>
consequences.</blockquote>
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<div>Your issue is hardware, not software. Copying a file while the computer shuts down with properly functioning hardware with a journaling filesystem (ext3, jfs) will result in only that single file being mangled, not general failures like what you're seeing. I know because I've done it plenty of times (computer was plugged into a lose plug so it wasn't shutdowns but power unplugs!) with my mythbox.
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<div>This REALLY sounds like a bad power supply, or else a motherboard whose northbridge has crapped out. The same thing problems would be happening in windows were you running it.</div></div>