is this to be expected??

[moltres_rider]

I had a 30 second power flash that caused my laptop to lose contact with my 2TB external hard drive...

the module I was working on was located on that drive and I also had the 'browse for instrument' window open to a folder on that drive...


as soon as the power flashed off then on ModPlug freezes for 30 seconds then messages me with 'OpenMPT has stopped working' no crash dump was ever asked of me...

is this to be expected when ModPlug loses contact of a drive??

[Saga Musix]

Uhm, I cannot give you any guarantees what OpenMPT will or will not do during a blackout. Same for all other software that accesses any device that suddenly gets disconnected for that reason.

[LPChip]

From a technical point of view, when you get a power flash (also called: power spike or overpowering) its never good for any electical device. Loss of data, crashing computer or any other weird symptom can be the result of that.

Basically, an electronical circuit is supposed to have a certain amount of power going through it. Too much power can do a few things. It will heat up the components that the power goes through and thus it may fry it. It will incease the intensity of the power, and if there are circuit elements on that use the intensity of the power as a measure device to calculate speed and other things, they might speed up/slow down depending on how they're supposed to work. As a result, timing issues can occur, where power arrives at a component before it is expected.

In such cases you can get weird things, from seeing artifacts on your screen, to software/drivers crashing.

If you just loose power, and your laptop battery takes over, nothing should happen. However, if you are using a remote connection at that time, and the powerfailure causes this connection to close for a second, it might look like a problem at first, but it should resolve itself with or without the user having to refresh the connection.

In your case, I think you just lost power, and your 2TB external drive uses an external power supply, which in his terms lost power.

So your laptop was still powered by the battery, and you clicked on a map, but while accessing this map, it lost connection. As OpenMPT was accessing the file/folder at the moment this happened, this can be expected to happen because the connection was not lost in an expected way. Even if you disconnect a drive, a signal is properly sent to make it seamless. In your case, there was no power to do so.