Hello all,

I just bought a new system, and am having a terrible time trying to run it... First, here are my components :

MSI KT3 ULTRA mobo (with ATA 133 onboard controller)
AMI BIOS 5.5 (latest)
512 mb ddr 333
Win XP, with all patches and fixes
Latest VIA drivers
80 pin cables
ATHLON XP 1900+ CPU
ATI RADEON 8500LE
SB Audigy Gamer
Linksys 100tx ethernet card
Antec 430 psu

Whenever i start adding programs after installing XP, i get "delayed write failure" problems (multiple pop-ups from xp) until all data on the drive corrupts and the drive becomes inaccessible, at which time i have to re-format and install XP all over again (I have done that 10 times since friday!). There is no identifiable pattern with this problem, meaning that it never happens after a particular program installation; I had the drive fail once after installing ATI's drivers, once after SB audigy's drivers, once after installing Norton Systemworks, etc.

What's odd is that XP runs ok as long as i add nothing on the drive : no programs, drivers, etc. That's why i can write this message now... Also, I tried putting the drive in PIO mode once, and I was able to install as many programs as i could. I then proceded to put the drive back in UDMA mode in windows, rebooted, and as soon as XP's GUI started, everything went corrupt : Lots of "delayed write failure" pop-ups, until eventually (10 minutes later) i could no longer use anything and the drive became unmountable.

I trimmed the pc down to the essentials and removed all non-important peripherals such as my scanner, printer, camera, UPS serial cable link, joystick, etc. And that didn't change a thing.

Also, i tried disabling just about every function that i knew could cause problems : I disabled the disk write cache once, disabled APIC, ICPA, APM, etc, everything, and nothing worked.

I tested the CPU, PSU, power outlet, UPS, Changed 80 pin cables, checked the jumper, etc. Everything turned out ok.

So i'm at a loss here... I'm sure the drive is failing, even though it passed maxtor's test... And I don't know what to make of the fact that it runs ok in PIO mode (although Very, very slow) but corrupts all data in DMA mode...

Has anyone experienced such a problem before?
Would anyone know how to correct the problem?

Also, does anyone have the same motherboard/Hard disk/OS combo? Have you had problems running xp? How has the drive behaved?

Thanks very much for letting me know

Check my problem posting on the video forum on trying to install ATI Radeon Video drivers on my XP Home edition AMD 1.2 System. My computer is working fine but because of a gaming problem I wanted to install the latest video drivers, but when I do I get the problem you're having. The delayed write thing. My hard drive is totally fried after the system reboot. Fortunately I have my partition backed up to a Ghost Image so it's not a big deal to resinstall to get back where I started. I also have an 80 Meg Maxtor HD. I don't think your problem is a HD problem, I suspect it's a driver problem. I haven't beemn able to solve this problem yet and right now it only means that I can't play a game I paid $50 for ! Let me know if you get some insight.

Rob

Check my problem posting on the video forum on trying to install ATI Radeon Video drivers on my XP Home edition AMD 1.2 System. My computer is working fine but because of a gaming problem I wanted to install the latest video drivers, but when I do I get the problem you're having. The delayed write thing. My hard drive is totally fried after the system reboot. Fortunately I have my partition backed up to a Ghost Image so it's not a big deal to resinstall to get back where I started. I also have an 80 Meg Maxtor HD. I don't think your problem is a HD problem, I suspect it's a driver problem. I haven't beemn able to solve this problem yet and right now it only means that I can't play a game I paid $50 for ! Let me know if you get some insight.

Rob

Check my problem posting on the video forum on trying to install ATI Radeon Video drivers on my XP Home edition AMD 1.2 System. My computer is working fine but because of a gaming problem I wanted to install the latest video drivers, but when I do I get the problem you're having. The delayed write thing. My hard drive is totally fried after the system reboot. Fortunately I have my partition backed up to a Ghost Image so it's not a big deal to resinstall to get back where I started. I also have an 80 Meg Maxtor HD. I don't think your problem is a HD problem, I suspect it's a driver problem. I haven't beemn able to solve this problem yet and right now it only means that I can't play a game I paid $50 for ! Let me know if you get some insight.

Rob

Hi guys,

I recently had the same delayed write failure when trying to copy some files onto my D-drive (Maxtor 28 GB). I either occured when trying to copy onto it from CD or from system C-drive (an identical Maxtor 28 GB).

In my Event Viewer (Win XP) an system error was reported: the file system structure (NTFS) is corrupt and unusable. Please run the chkdsk utility on the volume D. I did that (approx. 1 h duration) with the 2 chkdsk-options "checked", and the problem seems to have gone for the moment (I hope it stays that way).

Perhaps worth a try?

Cheers,

Spike

I also have the same problem, and I have narrowed it down a bit.

I have the AIW Radeon 8500 128mb on an Athlon XP 1800+, VIA KT266A chipset, Quantum Fireball 40 gig, it's an Epox 8KHM motherboard. I am running Windows XP Home Upgrade.

I can reboot maybe twice before I lose my C: drive. Tried replacing everything; hard drive, SCSI card, power supply, memory. I didnt have the problem until i went to the AIW Radeon 8500 from the AIW Radeon 7200. I used several different versions of the Catalyst and prior versions, and I have the latest VIA chipset drivers installed, with write caching disabled. Nothing seems to help.

There is definitely something about the Radeon 8500 that raises a compatibility issue. You may try putting Windows XP on a FAT32 partition, and when you get up and running, back up your registry. I found a utility called WinRescue that will create boot disks and spare registries. You have to use a special program to be able to boot to NTFS.

try installing the catalist 2.03 before the via 4in1's after a fresh reinstall of xp.....radeon drivers are great at corrupting or causing conflicts with the agp drivers. If that fails to work then skip the software installs for the all in wonder and just load drivers....I had this problem with a customer a few months back and his system has been flawless ever since.

make sure you have a current bios flash as well!

http://www.docmodgod.com

In the bios on your motherboard, make sure you check to see that boot sector protection and/or virus scanning is NOT enabled. That has a tendency to corrupt hard disks and for some reason, makes 2000 and XP very crashable. I've encountered this problem a lot myself, and I find that by disabling that option in the bios fixes it. Check it out and let me know what you find out.

Actually, I have found the source of the problem.

The "delayed write failed" error goes away when I turn off UDMA on the secondary channel. It seems you can't run 2 channels on UDMA with a VIA chipset, and my Epox 8KHM has a KT266A chipset.

It wouldn't be the antivirus on boot, b/c my system worked fine with the AIW Radeon 7200 card I have in the closet now. I upgraded to the AIW 8500 128 MB.

I'm up and running, and believe me if my system was gonna crash, based on what it was doing this morning, it would have done it many times this afternoon, on any attempt to write to the hard drive.

In the end I solved my problem in the following way. I unpacked the new Radeon 8500 drivers to a temp directory then I ininstalled my old Radeon 8500 drivers in reguar mode and then I booted up in safe mode. I cancelled out of installing the video drivers detected by XP and installed the new drivers maunually from the add new hardware in the control panel. After this I rebooted and had no problems. Go figure??????

Well, I did get an error, but a different one.

Apparently, I lost the ability to sign on as an administrator. XP is nice to me and signs me in under the default profile, and I have to add a toolbar to avoid having to rebuild my start menu. I will try your fix: installing Radeon 8500 drivers in safe mode before XP can automate it for me.

BTW, what's the best way to stop the automatic driver install?

I believe this to be a Maxtor 40GB problem.

My PC has Matrox G450 and Promise raid controller with 2x 40GB Maxtors and I have this problem.

My other PC has 9700Pro with Promise Raid with 2 x 120GB and no problems.

You may also want to download the VIA Bus Master Ultra ATA Controller for W2K-XP. You can find it at the VIA page. It promises to give you not only PIO but also
- PIO Mode 4
- Multiword DMA mode 0,1,2
- UDMA mode 0,1,2
What is "interesting" and very inexplicable, is that they did not include this driver in the 4in1 setup (just have a look at their reason: "The VIA IDE Miniport driver does not install with the VIA 4in1 drivers. It should only be installed on systems with a VIA chipset"!!!!).

Here's the link:
http://downloads.viaarena.com/drivers/others/IDE_MPD3014.zip

I hope it helps.

Bye...

I have a KT4 Ultra Mobo, XP 2200 + CPU, GeForce 4, 512Mb DDR PC 333 RAM and a western digital HDD.
Initially after installing Windows XP pro, i installed all the drivers that MSI provided. These included the VIA chipsette drivers, USB drivers etc. I started getting BSOD's quite frequently after this and the file system (NTFS) became quite corrupt. I flashed the BIOS, zero-filled the HDD and reinstalled Windows. I then disabled most of the unecessary hardware devices and did not install the 3rd party drivers for them. I only installed the drivers that were supplied on the Windows update site.
After having done all this, i did not receive any BSOD's (too early to say they wont happen though) but i did get the following in my Event Viewer:
Source: ntfs,
Category: disk
Event: 55,
The file system structure on the disk is corrupt and unusable. Please run the chkdsk utility on the volume C:

I believe this problem is either going to be caused by my HDD or by the mobo. Although i haven't gone through the process of elimination like sticking in a new HDD to see if the problem still exists, i have run diagnostic tools on it and it would appear that it is defect free which means that it is more likely to be the mobo.
check this link out:
http://www.eventid.net/display.asp?eventid=55&source=

My system is by no means stable, and although it is very quick, it's only a matter of time before apps become corrupted and the system crashes.

dunno if this helps you at all. at the moment i'm very pi$$ed off and i'm gonna take my hardware back to the store and get a replacement mainboard as well as HDD.

If anyone else out there has gone through the same thing, please let me know. i want a clearer understanding of what's going on. thanks.

Well, I've done a little tinkering, and bought other hardware, and I've come to a conclusion.

The problem is the ATI 8500 drivers.

They need to be installed at a certain time. I install XP, then SP1, then sound card, chipset drivers, then ATI 8500. THEN, I use WinRescueXP's RegPack feature to clean up ATI's mess. This seems to work best.

You can't move the swap file. It's best to leave it on the Windows drive, at default (yes, I know it will defragment) size.

If you change the IOPageLockLimit, the driver may crash.

Best to back up your registry, use Norton Ghost, or get another video card.

Hi, here is a way to defragment the pagefile on w2k using the built-in defragger:

First of all, set min and max size values of pagefile to 0. This will cause an error message to appear. Just ignore it. Restart Windows. Run the built-in disk defragger. Next, reset min and max to their original values. Then restart the system again... you are done:·)

Bye

Actually, if you disable "fast user switching compatibility", you may be able to stop getting this error if you have a Radeon 8500.

Run MSCONFIG. Under services, uncheck "Fast User Switching Compatibility". Then reboot. It may help. I enabled IOPAGELOCKLIMIT (available under RamIdle or Viettre MiTweakXP), and this time the video drives didn't crash the system. However, boot time is noticeably longer.

Just an FYI for anyone else having the same problem I just had.

Same symptoms you all described above, except with a Geforce 4 MX 440 PCI card added to a Dell Dimension 2350 running Windows XP Home.

Problem occurred after installing the drivers, then changing the primary video from "Integrated" to "PCI" in the BIOS. Those errors sprung everywhere giving me paths to critical system directories that I thought were fried... I could never get into the desktop deep enough to trouble shoot anything.

I finally went into Safe Mode and disabled the on-board card in device manager... Bang.... Problem gone... I agree with the poster above that this may have been cause by the Intel On-board AGP drivers stepping on the newly installed Nvidia PCI drivers...

I am having similar problems. As far I have installed XP 4 times all over.

Radeon drivers are the cause of this problem. When I install everything else but leave readeon drivers uninstalled, the system works fine. "Delayed write failure" appears after second boot with radeon driver.

The other way of making the system stable, is to pull out all the PCI cards. This way radeon drivers work ok, but immediately after adding sound blaster live card "edlayed write failure" appeears again.

Neither UDMA mode on disabling write cache have any effect on the problem and I even tested the disk drive with an other computer. So it is not a problem with physical hard drive.

Does anybody have similar problems and possible cure for them?

sounds like maybe your letting your bios assign irq's......just a toss in the wind but, see if your bios has the option of plug and play os and enable or change it to yes. Clear nvram and reboot. If that doesnt work then check your page file size. If its a delayed write failure then it could be a sign of a bad cache on the disk as well......are you trying to synch a transfer when these symptons occur? I have several maxtor ata 133 drives from the old style 80gig2mb cache to the new 80gig8mb cache and all of them are working along side of radeon 8500 built by, 8500 aiw, and 2- 9700pros. Out of over 13 systems built in the past 4 months I havent had this error occur........however my scsi does it all the time when trying to synch transfers with an ultra ata......strange huh.
Did you make sure acpi was enabled prior to loading windows?