“The reboot question in Windows is a bit of a double-edged
sword. On the one hand, this is one OS that definitely forces you
to reboot far too often. On the other hand, it recovers fairly well
from sudden resets and shutdowns. For those playing with everyone’s
favorite OS du jour, Linux, this is definitely not the case.”
“Any unceremonious system shut-down can result in Linux’s file
system becoming corrupted. Yes, this is true for Windows 9x and NT
as well but this has never happened to me even once using Windows.
After only mild tinkering with Linux for less than a year, it
happened just a few days ago. This is a real concern. And what can
you do if it happens to you?”
“As it turns out, you’ll end up running a meatier version of the
same program Linux runs anyway. Whereas Windows will run ScanDisk
to check your hard disk, Linux runs fsck (or e2fck or xfsck, if
you’re running without the fsck automatic front-end) to check its
file systems.”