corrupted file after power disruption

[kalos]

hello

I was using a software (mirc) and this software reads a txt file (script.ini) to perform some actions, it does NOT write on this file anything

but when the power of the laptop stopped, and I had to reboot, this file was corrupted (it contained NULL characters when opened with notepad)

1. is there a way to restore it?

2. why this happened? I mean, since there was no write activity at this file at all, why just reading the file got the file corrupted? is it winxp or hard disk's fault?

3. how can I prevent such failures in the future?

thanks

[Carol Haynes]

Can't answer 1 or 2.

For 3 - why did the power fail?

If the battery has run out there is not much you can do except plugin the computer.

If it is a power failure to your power supply either make sure you have a charged battery installed or get a UPS so that even without mains power you have sufficient time to shut down your system (or use software to automatically shutdown cleanly on power failure).

[kalos]

it's a laptop and it run out of battery

is there a program that can ensure that some crucial files (eg some ini's) are safe from such disaster?

[Carol Haynes]

I haven't looked in Vista but in XP if you go to Control Panel > Power Options there is an alarm tab which lets you set a battery level where an alarm is given and an action can be set.

You could set this so that at 10% battery life left it warns you and at 5% battery life it automatically hibernates.

That way if you are at the computer you can grab a power lead if it is to hand and if you have left it unattended it can look after itself!

[f0dder]

If you're using NTFS as filesystem, this shouldn't happen - unless mIRC is doing something stupid... which it might very well be doing