ReactOS Looses / Discards changes made before crashing

Ask your support questions in here

Moderator: Moderator Team

Post Reply
Julcar
Posts: 164
Joined: Thu Jul 31, 2008 8:19 pm

ReactOS Looses / Discards changes made before crashing

Post by Julcar »

This is a old issue that I've noted with RoS, suppose this scenario:

Fresh install, I choose a screen resolution, install some apps, create or download files from internet, etc, then a FSE appears and the entire system has to be turn off and rebooted.

After rebooting you can notice that the changes you've made before the crash have been disappeared, even the files you could believe were written to disk (this tested both virtual and real hw) aren't on their folders, it's like the entire system is reset to its inital state (or the state saved on the last clean shutdown), of course if you do a clean shutdown, then every change is saved and written to registry or hard disk so at the new boot the changes remains.

I don't know why ReactOS lacks of this kind of persistence, seems that the changes only stays on RAM and if the system can't be resumed, those changes are lost.
Question: it is a real bug or a design feature?

Thanks everybody :oops:
ThFabba
Developer
Posts: 293
Joined: Sun Jul 11, 2010 11:39 am

Re: ReactOS Looses / Discards changes made before crashing

Post by ThFabba »

It's the nature of disk caching. Changes are written to the physical disk in a delayed fashion, so a crash will discard everything in the cache that hasn't been written yet.
Windows will do the exact same thing; however NTFS is more resilient against this due to journaling -- and it also crashes less -- so you don't notice it as much.

That said, there may be certain things in ROS that make this worse than it needs to be. The lack of a lazy writer was certainly one of those, so the situation should have improved at least a little since that was implemented.
Improved disk repair functionality as well as registry journaling may further improve the situation -- however they will only avoid corruption, not data loss... so not crashing is still the best option ;)


PS: a little pet peeve... "FSE" is a really confusing abbreviation, please avoid it. "Fatal System Error" is the layman's term for "bug check", so anyone referring to it frequently enough to want to abbreviate it may as well learn the proper term instead ;)
Julcar
Posts: 164
Joined: Thu Jul 31, 2008 8:19 pm

Re: ReactOS Looses / Discards changes made before crashing

Post by Julcar »

Is there some time span where the lazy writer "writes" the cache to disk?
Post Reply

Who is online

Users browsing this forum: No registered users and 25 guests