A word of warning. Here's a little popup that made my heart flutter last night:
It happened when I was preparing to suspend my laptop so I could take it with me and get a little work done while I was out & about.
I store VPC images on an external LaCie d2 hard drive that is connected to my laptop via USB. What I'd just done was save the state of the VPC I was working in at the time. Because I've had problems in the past with suspending & resuming my laptop while a VPC image was running, I've made it a habit to save the VPC before suspending. As soon as VPC indicated it was done saving everything, I pulled all the plugs that were tethering my laptop to my desk to head for the car. A beat after pulling the plug, that scary little balloon pops up.
Apparently even though VPC proper was done writing everything out to disk, Windows wasn't done just yet. Delayed write is one of those features of Windows that I knew was there, but not one I dwelled at all in my day to day life; or had ever been affected in a negative way by before. So it wasn't even on my mental radar when I pulled the plug.
Luckily it was just the VSV file where the state of my VPC was stored that was hosed. The VMC file that contains the VPC's configuration was also toast (the reported file size was correct, but it appeared empty in notepad). After deleting the corrupt VSV file and restoring the VMC file with a backed up copy, I've sinced booted that VPC and had a look around. It seems to be working fine, but I suppose time will tell.
At any rate, that was a little too close for comfort.
So don't be too quick to pull that plug.
Posted
May 27 2005, 07:55 AM
by
mike-woodring