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What does ACPI shutdown mean??? I tried Googling it but nothing relevant came up!!! can anybody tell me what it is???

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_C ... _Interface

ACPI shutdown is a signal sent to the OS by an ACPI compliant chipset, e.g. when you push the PCs power button. Alternatively, it is the OS shutdown triggered by the receipt of that signal.

So just to clarify, going to "Machine -> ACPI Shutdown" doesn't shutdown gracefully and does the same thing as pushing the power button on the PC? I want to be able to shutdown the VM the same way as pushing the power button...

Verb wrote:So just to clarify, going to "Machine -> ACPI Shutdown" doesn't shutdown gracefully and does the same thing as pushing the power button on the PC? I want to be able to shutdown the VM the same way as pushing the power button...

No it is not. ACPI shut down is graceful.
If you want to pull the plug you click the title bar close and click power off the machine. But beware. This will probably not be a good thing. Why do you want to pull the plug anyway?

Perryg wrote:

Verb wrote:So just to clarify, going to "Machine -> ACPI Shutdown" doesn't shutdown gracefully and does the same thing as pushing the power button on the PC? I want to be able to shutdown the VM the same way as pushing the power button...

No it is not. ACPI shut down is graceful.
If you want to pull the plug you click the title bar close and click power off the machine. But beware. This will probably not be a good thing. Why do you want to pull the plug anyway?

If a computer is hacked you don't want a graceful shutdown because it changes so much evidence. Thanks for telling me how to do it, but now you got me curious if closing the window and powering off the VM is more risky than pulling the plug on a physical computer?

Verb wrote:now you got me curious if closing the window and powering off the VM is more risky than pulling the plug on a physical computer?

Where's the room for curiosity? Perry already told you that it's the same.

mpack wrote:

Verb wrote:now you got me curious if closing the window and powering off the VM is more risky than pulling the plug on a physical computer?

Where's the room for curiosity? Perry already told you that it's the same.

He didn't say it was the same, it could just be the closest thing to it for a VM and from the way he described it as probably not a good thing and using red, it makes it seem like it's more risky. In the days of FAT, I would say it's probably not a good thing, but file systems/operating systems are pretty good at recovering from hard shutdowns now so I wanted to make sure there isn't something different about VMs that I don't know about.

Let me clarify then. As a one off like you are describing it would not matter since you would never actually boot that drive again, but rather use specific forensic software to read bytes sector by sector. Stopping any machine whether it is virtual or metal by pulling the cord is always a risk.

It depends on what is being written at the time of pulling the cord on whether data was lost and if so was it system specific, well you get the point. I have from time to time had to power down this way when the guest became unresponsive or hung, but as a fall back I always keep a good clone to be able to recover just in case. If I didn't feel that pulling the cord had the potential to cause a catastrophic failure I wouldn't waste the time to make sure I could recover, but trust me it can happen.

Got it, thanks