Hard reboot vs soft reboot

Robert Crandal

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Mar 12, 2013, 5:21:31 AM3/12/13

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I know this is off topic for Win32, but I preferred to ask this question to
all the gurus here.

So, I know HOW to conduct a hard or soft reboot on a Windows PC.
I would like to know WHEN is a good time to perform a hard boot or
a soft boot??

If the screen freezes or I get a "blue screen of death", I obviously
understand
that a hard boot is the only option. What are the various situations when
I
should do a hard boot?? Or a soft boot? And why?

I know it's a dumb question, but my A+ guides don't really give too much
information on this top. I was just hoping to get more information if
possible.

Thank you gurus.

Deanna Earley

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Mar 12, 2013, 5:32:07 AM3/12/13

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Always shutdown/reboot gracefully if possible, If it's not, power
cycle/hard reboot.

--
Deanna Earley (dee.e...@icode.co.uk)
iCatcher Development Team
http://www.icode.co.uk/icatcher/

iCode Systems

(Replies direct to my email address will be ignored. Please reply to the
group.)

Rick C. Hodgin

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Mar 12, 2013, 11:28:28 AM3/12/13

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> So, I know HOW to conduct a hard or soft reboot on a Windows PC.
> I would like to know WHEN is a good time to perform a hard boot or
> a soft boot??

Soft boots tell the operating system that it's shutting down. This allows the OS to signal all the running programs that they're shutting down, giving all of them a chance to close their files, disconnect their handles or network connections, and exit "politely."

Technically a hard boot can do the same thing as a soft boot, but if you press the reset button, for example, it does not. It just completely bypass the normal protocol and just ... ends.

This could have the side-effect of not writing cached data to disk, thereby possibly corrupting files, etc. A program may have been in the middle of a write and the crash would cause an issue with the file system or part of the disk. Or it could've been communicating with another computer or server somewhere and that server now suddenly has to deal with data that was not properly transmitted, and no ping responses, etc.

> If the screen freezes or I get a "blue screen of death", I obviously
> understand that a hard boot is the only option. What are the various
> situations when I should do a hard boot?? Or a soft boot? And why?

There should be no places where you want to do a hard boot outside of a catastrophic system failure like the blue screen of death. In all other cases do a soft boot.

> I know it's a dumb question, but my A+ guides don't really give too much
> information on this top. I was just hoping to get more information if
> possible.

There are no dumb questions when a person legitimately seeks to increase their knowledge. Every question gives us the opportunity to grow and share together. I welcome your question.

The hard boot is an interesting condition. A computer can do a soft boot or a hard boot at any time through a few simple instructions. In the early days it was actually kind of hard to trap certain kinds of errors in the kernel and it would cause something called a triple-fault, which would signal a hard boot automatically as the CPU (in the case of a triple fault, meaning a fault, which caused a fault, which caused a fault) could not continue processing in that condition. Later systems catch them on the second faults properly and rarely do we see a triple-fault.

There is a setting BIOS looks for in memory which determines whether or not it's a hard boot or a soft boot. When the machine is powered on it will all be 0s. When a soft boot is requested, it's a special number.

A computer operating system can set or clear out those bytes when it does the reset, thereby allowing BIOS to do the true hard or soft boot.

Best regards,
Rick C. Hodgin

JJ

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Mar 12, 2013, 2:34:34 PM3/12/13

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A case when the system is not completely halted and...

* A permanent data corruption is in progress. Like a rootkit formatting a
harddisk. Doing soft reboot would give time for the system to do
housekeeping cleanups. More data will be wiped out by the time the
hardware actually rebooted. Or...

* Initiating a soft reboot would trigger already broken code that may
cause data corruption when the current system state is unstable. i.e.: an
unexpected system error has just occurred, but it did not cause immediate
and permanent data corruption. This is usually a corruption in memory and
the function to save data to disk has not yet been issued.

Robert Crandal

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Mar 13, 2013, 5:00:22 AM3/13/13

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Thanks to everyone who responded. I appreciate everyone's help!

8)