winscape 2303

What an awful thing to say to a person. :-)

Seriously, that seems unlikely. I started out on mainframes and have really very little experience with operating systems that are not "real" multi-user systems. I'm the one who posted about being appalled by "the difference between MS-DOS and a real operating system", remember? I have another story that involves learning the difference between Windows 95 and a real operating system. (Short version: By doing something dumb-that-I-didn't-know-was-dumb, I wiped out some large and critical part of the system files. The machine would boot, but Windows wouldn't start. Fortunately this was in a lab where all the machines had something done to them daily that put them back into newly-installed-o-s condition. But I was appalled, simply appalled, that as a regular user -- i.e., not an administrator -- I was able to do this much damage. I think I didn't "get" that on systems like that, regular users *are* administrators .... )

Yes. So maybe the question is whether this is an inevitable result when Windows NT "crashes". I put that in quotes because I'm not sure what it means. Power interruptions probably don't count. "Machine locks up and needs to be rebooted"? BSOD? I'm fairly sure that at least some of these do not corrupt the disk to the point where a reinstall is needed. Someone else who knows more can probably confirm that.

I interpreted the "retry-reboot-reinstall" comment to mean something more like this: No one really understands how these systems work, certainly not most of their users, and frequently the people who are trying to help them don't know much more. However, one can fix a lot of problems by simply returning the machine to a known state and trying the failing operation again, and doing this on escalating levels until the problem goes away. Something didn't work? Try it again; maybe it will this time. Still no good? Reboot; maybe the machine is a confused state which rebooting will fix. Still no good? Reinstall; ....

To someone from an environment where machines are expected to stay up for months or even years and serve many users, this is an unbelievably crude and simplistic approach to problem diagnosis and resolution. (I imagine you know this.) I buttumed that was the OP's point. Maybe not.

-- B. L. Mbuttingill ObDisclaimer: I don't speak for my employers; they return the favor.