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it happened to me 4/5 times that I had to do a forced shutdown (by holding down the power button) because Ubuntu got frozen (the freezes occurred when I tried to drag and drop the icons from the desktop to Cairo-dock or due to a very heavy Gnome extension, anyway now I have removed both and I have no more problems). However, I later discovered that I could avoid a forced shutdown, since even in the event of a freeze with the combination "CTRL + ALT + F1" it takes me back to the login screen from which I can shutdown or restart.

My question is: in these 4/5 times that I have forced the PC to shutdown, instead of rebooting with "CTRL + ALT + F1", can I somehow have damaged Ubuntu? And, if so, is there a way to verify it?

The only check I've done so far was a fsck from Live-USB to my Ubuntu partition, which returned "non-contiguos 0.3%". Do I have to worry about this result? Can I do other tests?

Thanks in advance for your replies!

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    Yes a forced shutdown can leave a unclean file-system, and thus a broken system (usually minor damage). Why would you force-shutdown via power off though? Did you have a kernel panic as you didn't mention it, and you can tell the kernel to clean shutdown via SysRq commands direct (even if GUI is frozen.. as you command kernel direct via keyboard). If you forget or are unfamiliar with SysRq commands, pulling out a phone or other & searching "magic sysrq" will pull up the wikipedia page on it which is as good as any to remind you of keystroke/commands
    – guiverc
    Commented Nov 18, 2020 at 0:20
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    My old computer has a busted fan and shuts down several times a day, If I am in the middle of installing something at the time, I have to run sudo dpkg --configure -a to be able to resume the install. Commented Nov 18, 2020 at 5:33
  • as I still get several or more total lockups a day for many many months now, I have had to hard boot a lot, I have not had any problems doing so. 20.10 (I am looking into sysreq now, thanks for that guiverc. Kate text editor and firefox (nowadays) handle ungraceful exits well and recover or allow recovery of their state/data)
    – pierrely
    Commented Nov 21, 2020 at 6:50
  • If you're getting multiple hard lockups a day; I'd check your hardware... boot a live system and do memory tests (does it complete?), open the box & do a cap-check, etc.. ie. prove your hardware is functional & not the cause (by being live you won't be using your existing system to validate it) GNOME extensions can cause the desktop to crash (esp. if abi/api's don't match; ie. extension is intended for a different vers. of GNOME), but that's just logout & not lock up. Your last comment sounds like hardware issues..
    – guiverc
    Commented Nov 21, 2020 at 7:48

1 Answer 1

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Yes, it can, but unless you notice any new problems, your system is probably OK.

You should still try to avoid doing this in the future. You could experience problems if the system shut down in the middle of writing some file.

It's hard to say exactly how any problem might manifest because it really is a factor of what exactly got interrupted and whether or not the interruption caused any negative effects.

Thankfully, you don't really need to worry too much about services and daemons as they are pretty resilient and they mostly get refreshed during boot anyway.

If you're curious you can check your system logs to see what was taking place before you forced shutdown.

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  • Thanks, how can I check system logs? And for the fsck result ("non-contiguos 0.3%") I have to worry or it is ok?
    – aliquo93
    Commented Nov 18, 2020 at 0:34
  • Without context I can't advise on the non-contiguous bit. You should add the entire unredacted output in your question. It could be harmless. Log files are mostly stored under /var/log
    – Nmath
    Commented Nov 18, 2020 at 0:54
  • I opened the Ubuntu log app, and found these results... do you see something I have to worry about? i.imgur.com/1UHeXlo.png For the non-contiguos, it is the only output that fsck gives to me.
    – aliquo93
    Commented Nov 18, 2020 at 1:02
  • I can't read the resolution of the image. I suggest to copy-paste any concerning message into the search box here on AU or your favorite search engine. That's what I do if I don't recognize something exactly ;)
    – Nmath
    Commented Nov 18, 2020 at 1:30
  • This is the log in the screen: pastebin.com/kzp2Ejp5 Do you see something I have to worry about? Sorry I don't want to bother you, but I just want to be sure my system is fine! :)
    – aliquo93
    Commented Nov 18, 2020 at 1:37

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