Power cut kills XP

The power went out for a few seconds last night. Computer was on but the only job it was doing was creating a WinRAR archive.

I waited for about 30 secs before turning the pc back on. When it booted XP it got just before the Welcome screen and reset back to POST with no BSOD . It repeated this a few times, so I tried safe mode. That got me in to the desktop. I tried system restore but whenever I tried to boot xp normally it would just continue doing the reset thing.

I ended up spending a couple of hours re-installing. The re-install went fine and all hardware checks out okay. I didn't lose any data but I think it's time for a UPS.

Anyone else had power cuts kill their install in a similar way?

not on xp, but I'm sure I did on win98.

Power cuts average around once a month where I am, but this is the first time it's killed XP on me. Normally I just switch on again and everything's fine.

we had 5 or 6 power cuts last month, and I leave my system running all day and all night unsupervised. I had no problems here.

It is possible to get some kind of spike in these circumstances, One of our power outages was from lightning burning out the streets transformer. For some reason the transformers here are mounted about 50 feet up a post, a prime target for the lightning.

This one got hit twice this year, and we had no electricity for a couple of days.

I'ts probably a spike as you say, although there was no lightning, just light rain. Either that or xp was halfway through modifying a system dependant file or registry entry.

All's well now though. Just thought it was a bit strange as xp's never done that to me before and all because of a simple power cut.

It's rare, but does happen... If the crash coincides with modifying a registry key it can lead to a corrupted registry, which can prevent you from starting up among other things.

And you'll be absolutely *amazed* at just how often Windows updates the registry... Especially if you have some spyware running in the background.

Anyway, XP is no different than 2000, 98, 95 or ME -- they can all kill themselves if turned off with no warning at the wrong moment.

Invest in a battery backup/surge protection device. You just plug your computer and monitor into it, and plug the device into the wall socket. If power goes out, you can run on battery power to save open programs, then shut down. They are fairly cheap I believe.

I always use a laptop, I like how it just switches to battery power unphased... its the only thing that survives a power outage.

I only think we've had one power cut in the last 12 or so years here, and I was using my lappy at the time, so that would be a big no from me. Yeah, you can get a cheap UPS for next to nothing these days. Just make sure you get one that'll power your screen aswell. :o>

kenshin, for future reference, when you booted it into safe mode, you should have gone to System Properties --> Advanced --> Startup and Recovery Settngs --> uncheck Automatically reset. That may have helped you to figure out what caused the BSOD (which you never saw due to the automatic reset).

Thx for the tip Toby. I'll try that if there is a next time.

@FlameDuck: Yeah, I'm pretty worried about the monitor. I'll be looking at a UPS in about 2 weeks. We got winter approaching here so I can expect a higher proportion of power cuts. I'd get one now but the monitor killed my finances. I'll probably need to spend a bit on a nice one though 'cause the manual states the monitor draws 220 watt.

Yes, I broke one of my machine when I accidentally unplugged the wrong plug. Oops! :( Windows had totally screwed and required a reinstall. Didn't lose owt tho, just deleted the dir and started again, the windows protection error of death.
It sucks that power cuts can totally destroy windows, requiring a reinstall. How secure is that? :(

Hope the situation improves for Vista. On a happier note, the freshness of a new install is nice. Window's is a bit snappier now and I'm happy that no data was lost and no hardware damaged.

I've been looking at which UPS to buy, something around the 1500 - 2000VA mark. That would power everything, and if I went for the 2000VA mark then I'd be able to run my laptop on it as well. It would also have a bit of power spare for further expansion. In particular, I was looking at one of these 2:

http://www.scorptec.com.au/index.php?prdid=13459
http://www.scorptec.com.au/index.php?prdid=16729

I had my PSU go dead while updating the video driver for a machine - that did kill my system. I had to reload everything from scratch. (it was windows 2000)