Hi all ! I just found the error that I have with my Maxtor 40 gig "delayed write failure".
I test the drive with PowerMax (app. from Maxtor) and gave to me a 6 digit code error. Maxtor say I must REPLACE the drive because it failed.
I hope this help to some users.

Hello all,

Yep I just built my new system with these specs:
Asus P4C800 MB
1 Gig Ram = using what's recommended by Asus = Kingston
9800 Radeon Pro
Seagate IDE 40 GB System and Docs drive = Master (using Cable Select)
Western Digistal IDE 120 GB Video Capture = Slave (using Cable Select)
Seagate Barracuda SATA 120 GB Video Capture as well = Third Master Drive on Serial Controller Not RAID
V-Gear TV-Tuner 3-in-1 Capture Card
V-Gear video bay component connectors
Using Built in sound card as well as Game Theatre XP 7.1 sound card from Hercules (awesome card) for sound capture.

Any way... As you can see I'm having the same problem with the "windows delayed write failed" message coming from my Serial ATA drive (Seagate). I'm strictly trying to use this drive for backups and video capture spill overs from the other drive WD.
I've used windows disk management to format the drive NTFS. It'll format it only using the long process. If I try quick format, I get the message "windows delayed write failed" then the system freezes up. The only way out is to reset it, once I reset, the BIOS hangs on post for ten minutes then comes back with an "hardware error; Third Master Hard Drive not detected or Missing". I power off, wait a few minutes then power on, the drive gets detected and windows loads. Once I start to copy files boom the message appears and it's all over for the next twenty or so minutes. Very annoying indeed. I'm not sure if it's a driver issue, but it keeps happening regardless of which drivers it uses.
Currently, I've disconnected the drive and no problems. The other two drives have never given me any errors and I've been using them for two years on my old system.

Merry Christmas....
_________________________________________________________________________________________

It's all fun and games until you put a new machine together. Then it's just...

I have had the {Delayed Write Fail} error when I try to use the XP Disk Defragmenter utility (DDU) or Nortons SW's Speed Disk. I have an Iomega 120 GB External FireWire HDD that I use to store full system backups only. During defrag, the {Delayed Write Fail} pop up application error box comes up and after clicking on it the External Drive is "lost" and not recognized by Windows Disk Management until I reboot. Then when I analyze the drive again with DDU it is completely fragmented and using Speed Disk I can sometimes Optimize the drive again. The problem is intermittent, the error occurred 1 out of two Speed Disk uses and everytime with the built-in XP


Latest update from the busTRACE.com as a followup to a link posted on this forum earlier:

{QUOTE}

December 1, 2003

Since originally posting this WEB page, we have received a number of e-mails from end users receiving the "Delayed Write" failure with their 1394 drive. In working with some of them, the write failure that they are experiencing is different than the one above. Their drive is able to write > 128K sectors but still fails with delayed write errors intermittently. The cause of their failure is unknown at this time.

If you are reading this because your 1394 drive is failing with delayed writes, and if you are wondering if the > 128K sector failure we see is identical to yours, we are providing a test applet that you can download. This application will read/write 128 sectors sequentially up to 512K sectors. If this applet does NOT generate the delayed write failure, then you are not experiencing the same problem we are. Before using this utility, be sure to backup your entire 1394 drive as delayed write failures can corrupt your drive. You assume all risk by using this software.

Please be sure to review our Terms of Use before downloading our software. After you run the test, please let us know of your results so we can keep this page updated. Click here to download the file 1394Test.exe. It is only 228KB in size and is compatible with Windows 2000 and above.

December 11, 2003

If you are look for our 1394 stress tester, to see if your drive has the delayed write failure we experience, you can find the details in the "December 1, 2003" section above.

Since we posted our December 1, 2003, update, we have received a number of e-mails from end-users with the results of their test. Our test app does duplicate the failure for a number of users. For them, this indicates that their failure matches our failure and the drive is having problems handling larger than 128K transfers. We have heard rumors that there is a firmware upgrade to fix this but have no official confirmation. If you know more, please let us know.

There are other users that run our test app and it works perfectly with no delayed write failure and no data loss. Even though our test app passes, these users still experience the delayed write failure at other times. In these cases, the root cause of the failure is unknown. Some users have had success by lowering the drive's UDMA speed for 6 down to 5, or even down to 2. To do this requires a utility from the drive vendor. Of course this is not a real solution but at least it might get you past the problem, albeit with a slower drive. That's the latest status as we know it. If you know of any solutions, please let us know and we'll update this page

{END QUOTE}

http://www.bustrace.com/products/delayedwrite.htm

Ron

Hi poor mates!
I've joined the club now with buying a external box for my maxtor PowerMax9 120GB Harddisk drive. I use it with USB 2.0 but here is a answer from Maxtor for "this" problem...

cheers

http://maxtor.custhelp.com/cgi-bin/maxtor.cfg/php/enduser/std_...X3BhZ2U9MQ**&p_li=

Folks please try this out. This might help!!

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;330174

Found the FIx...

As stupid as this sounds,
Right click my computer , properties,
Advanced, performance,
Settings , Advanced,

Memory Usage,
Adjust for best performance of ...

Make sure Programs is checked...

Checking system somehow made all this nonsence happen to me.

Peace.

Thank you for the reply, but it is NOT that simple. If you read and review more of the details from some of the other posters around on the Internet you will find that none of these fixes have helped.

I already posted the MS KB article you refer to. On my system I have never modified the memory setting for I/O or Applications.

There is definetly something wrong here that Microsoft, Promise, and ATI need to correct.

I have not seen ANY solution so far the corrects the problem for EVERYONE like a patch or other fix normally would do. Some people such as those listed here and other places do manage to fix the problem by altering one setting or another, but there are just as many that none of these so called fixes corrects the problem.

I agree with the above...

Although I do think it's a Windows problem more so than hardware. I in fact have just put my machine together a week ago. In the middle of installing programs i was getting this error about my F drive. Although, I wasn't installing anything on that drive. So, why was windows trying to access and what is it that it was writing to it. I strictly want to use the drive for Video Editing and Capturing that's it. I'm glad I didn't leap over and install my OS on it. Thank god for my IDE drives. BTW the drive that I'm having a problem with is an SATA 120GB drive. Running on my ASUS P4C800 Deluxe motherboard with the lates Bios and Drivers from ASUS. I don't think it's an ATI issue as well, since I've replace my ATI card with a TI4600 NVidia and reloaded my system for the second time. And again the error start at odd times either while i'm installing programs or just playing UT2003. The best thing is during game-play. The machine locks up, the game minimizes. Then I get "windows delayed write faile, F$MFT$ could not save your data..." blah, blah, blah. The only way out of anything is to shut down and reboot. Resetting the mahine doesn't help, 'cause windows still has something in the RAM and the Bios won't find the drive. I have to power off completely.
I even got another Hard Drive same model and size and I get the same results. I've tried both SATA controllers on the board and the same results. I truly think it's a windows thing. I disabled Write Caching on Disk and man did the disk run slow, even slower than a freaking floppy on writing I can't even capture Video with it. And yes, I got the same error.

Windows=WineDoze.

Hi all,

Just wanted to share my experiences and findings re. the above problem. I have a Maxtor 300 GB external hard drive which is connected to my Athlon XP box via FireWire. The PC is running WinXP Pro SP1. I purchased the drive a couple of days ago, together with a cheap FireWire/USB2 PCI card. This card has two FireWire ports. Connected the drive to FW port 1, XP immediately recognised it, all appeared to be good. Copied some large files to/from the drive, everything was fine, no problems at all. Then I run Sandra Pro 2004 (a benchmarking software) to test the speed of the drive. The test completed successfully, although it indicated a lower performance than I expected. This is the beginning of the story...

Until that time there were no problems at all, but I was a bit disappointed about the low performance of the drive as indicated by Sandra. Reading the troubleshooting section of the manual I discovered that this drive (as with most Maxtor drives) has a "write-verify" mode which is active in the first 10 power-ons. This is to test the drive for write errors in case there is a serious fault with it. This verification obviously slows down the drive as it needs to read/compare the written data. At the eleventh power-on the verification turns itself off and the drive can reach its full speed. So I switched it on/off 10 times (as the manual suggests) to disable the verification. Then I tried to run Sandra again to test the speed and...BANG "Delayed Write Failure" !!!

Tried to repeat the Sandra test many times, after rebooting, etc. Not a single run was successful. In every test (at varying times during each test) I got the dreaded message. Searched the net for a solution and came to this forum. Read all the posts and applied all of the suggestions mentioned - no joy... I got the impression that there is no direct patch or fix to solve the problem. One thing was certain: The problem started exactly at the time the Maxtor became faster.

I also have a Toshiba Tecra M1 laptop which has FireWire. I connected the (now fast) drive to the laptop and run Sandra. NO PROBLEMS !!! No "Delayed Write Failure" !!! Repeated many times, every time was successful and the drive now gave me the expected really good performance (faster than my ATA100 internal drive!). Based on the this, the problem had to be with my PC or FireWire card.

I then connected the Maxtor to my desktop PC again, but this time I plugged it to the ***second*** FireWire port (remember the card has two). NO PROBLEMS AT ALL !!! Similar performance to that of the laptop. As it turns out, the problem was with the card's FW port 1 !!! The above behaviour was consistent throughout the tests (FW port 1 recognises the drive fine, but gives "Delayed Write Failure" msgs on large files or Sandra tests, FW port 2 works ABSOLUTELY FINE).

Swapped the el-cheapo crappy card (branded as "InnoVision" using a VIA chipset) with another one (using a NEC chipset). This latter card has 4 FireWire ports (and no USB2). Tried the drive on every one of the 4 ports, NO PROBLEMS AT ALL !!! I haven't seen the "Delayed Write Failure" message since I put the new card in, and have filled the drive with about 100 GB of non-stop transfers.

CONCLUSION: The problems that many people are experiencing may be related to the quality/chipset of the FireWire controller card. This is not easy to spot because even the bad cards still recognise the drive and even work for small to moderate size files. It seems that when the FireWire reaches very high and sustained transfer rates then the quality of the FW controller/chipset becomes an issue. Well, at least that's what seems to happen in my case.

So, my suggestions to those who still have the "Delayed Write Failure" problem is to try another FW controller. If you can afford it, go for something better & more expensive.

I hope this helps someone out there.
Good luck to all.

Costas

Glad to hear you got your system working Costas.

I don't have or use a Firewire drive so this is not even related to my own hardware/software issues. Thanks though for sharing your experience with everyone. Hopefully it does help others in the same situation as you were in.

Hello All i am a new member to this forum and i have read over your probs. i had the same problem as you specify and i did some research in google to figure this out. my system specs are as follows

asus radeon 9600xt
amd athlon xp 2500 (underclocked courtesy of ddr 266)
512 megs of pc2100 (soon to be upgraded to 1024 megs of pc 3200)
soyo kt-400 ultra platinum
creative audigy 2 platinum
thermaltake xaser II skull (soon to be installed is the addition of watercooling courtesy of thermaltake and koolance)
windows xp pro
and a partridge ina pear tree

it seemed after i installed my video card and sound card drivers this problem arose on my system. i could install one or the other and the system worked just fine. but as soon as i installed them both delayed write failed problems started. after several foprmats and extensive research, i found a solution to my problem

right click on my computer icon and click properties. click the advanced tab and select settings under perfomance. click the advanced tab and make sure the radio dial for both processor scheduling and memory usage is set to programs and NOT to system cache. for some of you i have no doubt this should solve your problem.after your through changing these settings restart computer for them to take effect.

check back and let me know how it went.

best regards.

Richard,

Thanks for your reply but if you did read all of the posts you would see that this fix has already been discussed, and in fact does help some people, but for others (myself included) I have not modified this setting in the first place. It is not set to the large memory setting for background services.

There is an article on ATI and MS that both discuss this, but this fix is more of a work around rather then a fix anyways. I should be able to set my memory setting to either setting without having an issue.

I resolved my "Delayed Write Failed" problem on a "LaCie 160go FireWire Disk" .

Just download and install Windows XP Service Pack 2 2055.
http://www.google.fr/search?q=windows+xp+service+pack+2+2055&a...&meta=

Works fine.

I just installed Learn to Speak Spanish Deluxe 9 by Bunderland which gives me a Write Failed error when I try to record my speech. After reading these boards, I may have a bigger problem to deal with. A few months before the Spanish software, I installed a ATA/133 PCI Controller card and a Maxtor 160GB IDE hard drive (slave drive). First and foremost, the PC always asks me to accept the hard drives by pressing F1 when it boots up. Annoying, but without any problems. Secondly, it almost appears that the PC is working overtime to accomodate these two drives - it doesn't access files very fast and I just upgraded the memory in the PC from 256 to 512. Looking back, I wish I would have gotten a hard drive at ATA/100 but this is what I have and I am determined to make this work efficiently. Any suggestions would be great!

Thanks,
James

I haven't posted anything on this for a while as i've not had the problem since swapping my drives (see my earlier post)

Can I ask a general question of people posting here what M/B chipsets are driving your USB?

This may be of no relevance but as i posted previously, my problem went away when the USB ports controlled by the VIA chip on my MB were disabled. (I have some usb controlled by intel south bridge and some by a via controller)

I am using a 2xMaxtor 60 Gig RAID 0 + 1xSeagate 120 Gig IDE 1 setup, running winXP from the C: partition on my raid array.

On booting, BIOS first does a device scan, discovering the IDE drive first and assigning it the label "Drive 0", the first HDD. The raid array is detected and initialised later. (Highpoint 372 Raid controller).

The Delayed Write Failure first occured after I installed the Seagate disk.
The Seagate disk has an 8 Mb cache on board.

I only get the Delayed Write Failure when booting. Then I get that wonderful message "Error saving c:\$MFt.. etc" and that is the end of windows.
I looked up the error message "0xc0000147": No page file.
Most interesting, as I most definitely had one.

I have now installed windows on the IDE drive and it is working fine:

My fixes:
Memory usage set for programs (not system cache).
HDD caching disabled for Seagate IDE in device manager.
+Cache fix from microsoft: Q315403.
This is supposed to fix the HDD caching problem.

I will destroy and rebuild my raid array and then do some stress testing. The system was perfectly stable until I installed the Seagate drive.
However even when the drive is deactivated windows was unstable on my raid array.
Will report back if I get raid up and running stable on my raid array.

I GOT 1000GIG HARD DRIVE THATS 4 X 250GIG HARDRIVES NOT 40GIG

It's been a while since I've had one of these failures, then last night, oila!! It's back. What happeneded between then and now? I removed the 80GB hard drive from my USB2/Firewire external case and replaced it with a 120GB. Reboot, bingo, error!

I can't believe Microsoft still hasn't solved this frigging problem. So once again, I have to go back to the 80GB external disk with no hope for future upgrades.

I am so sick and tired of this I could spit.

Way to go Bill.

If you have a via chipset on your motherboard try to install the ''PCI Latency Patch'' from http://www.georgebreese.com/net/software/
and disable the Fast User Switching Compatibility Service.

Fix the delayed write failed error for me.

Windows XP SP1+PCI Latency PAtch

Interesting, I haven't seen this solution posted here before. I do have a VIA chipset, as well as a SoundBlaster Live! soundcard, so maybe this patch will do the trick.

One question however, I do not see where that specific patch addresses the delayed write failure issue. I don't really see a reference to hard drive failures other than corrupted files during transfers. Did you come across a reference somewhere else?

*********************************************************************************
<qoute>

"PCI Latency" patch for VIA chipsets
This is a Windows driver that will patch motherboards that have VIA chipsets. It is intended to solve many problems, including these:

Files copied from one IDE hard disk drive to another are corrupted
The computer stops ("freezes", "hangs", "locks up") when playing sounds, especially to a Creative SoundBlaster LIVE! card
The computer stops when copying to or from an IDE DVD, CDROM, or CDRW drive
Sounds played by a Creative Labs sound card are distorted
*********************************************************************************


Cheers, Jeff.