Print

[jefferelli]

I was wondering if anyone knows if powering off the console during gameplay will harm or corrupt harddrive. (If the game is being played from the harddrive). The reason I ask is because my daughter seems to have trouble remembering to do a IGR back to the evox menu. (which is where I usually try to get before I power down) But I do notice that some games will not allow me to get back to the evox dash and I just make sure a save game is not in process when I shutdown. Anyways is there a proper method for powering down once you are playing games of the hard drive? thanks

[opjose]

No it's not too problematic.

The Xbox "OS" (if you can call it that) doesn't hold updated directory tables in memory like Windows does, nor does it perform delayed writes.

The only time it would be a minor problem is during the game save process, which is why the games TELL you now to power down at this time.

At other times the disk is merely reading.

EVEN if your writing, the circuitry on the drives monitor the power state and once the voltage stop dropping, they quickly finish writing the current sector and STOP writing what is in their buffer.

This preserves the disk contents, but may corrupt an individual game and/or mismark a sector as used.

So no, don't worry about this. The xbox was designed from the start for this kind of activity.

In addition more often than not the game levels are cached to the X, Y, Z partitions for a purpose.

These caches improve performance, but are temporary work areas THAT CAN BE BLOWN AWAY in case of data corruption.

If the Xbox sees that they are too corrupt it will reformat them.

In addition, there is a particular button press sequence which you can execute that forces the MS dashboard to do the same on purpose.

[jefferelli]

Thanks for the info . Much appriciated. Now I feel better letting her just shut down whenever she wants.  

[opjose]

No problem!