corruption during power loss

[Michael Soulier <msoulier@storm.ca>]

	My biggest complaint about RedHat/Mandrake while I was using them
was the fact that if I lost power, the disk caching would cause the
filesystem to be corrupted, often seriously so. I'd cringe when I booted
up again, because inevitably, I'd be prompted to login as root and run
fsck myself. Often I'd have to reinstall a bunch of packages, and it
didn't help that doing an rpm -Va to verify everything inevitably returned
false negatives on package integrity due to broken rpms. 

	Then I installed Debian. I've had about 5 losses of power since,
and each time, the system has come up without a scratch. Minor inode
problems easily fixed by fsck without manual control necessary. I noticed
the entries in /etc/inittab for powerloss, but the script it's pointing to
for me is not installed, so it's not that, although I'd like to know what
this /etc/init.d/powerfail script is.

	So I ask, what aspect of Debian makes it superior in this
respect? What's causing the wonderful lack of corruption during power
failures?

	Thanks guys,

	Mike

"To listen to the words of the learned, and to instill into others the
lessons of science, is better than religious exercises."
		-- Prophet Muhammad (pbuh)