That is, I have narrowed down the problem to one conflicting element that when triggered will send the system to robot hell.

And the element is...

Drum roll please...

...Memory Cache! Setting Start->Control Panel->System->Advanced->(Performance) Settings->Advanced->(Memory Usage) to System Cache rather than Programs causes the severe program error we are all here to solve. Fast application switching and driver version are problem-agnostic. Unfortunately, changing that setting directly in the registry was a popular XP Tweak a while back, and I believe if XP is going to be used as a server it defaults to "System."

This works on my system, YMMV. Hopefully this will be the common thread in the problems people are facing, and hopefully ATI will be smacked around a bit for not expecting gamers to run heavily tweaked systems.

I had my settings the way you described and I STILL had the problem trying to install the Catalyst 3.2 drivers. It surely is a puzzlement what causes this problem. You'd think ATI would be able to come up with an explanation as to what's going on. All of the problems I had with the 8500 dissuaded me from upgrading to their latest video card when I bought my new system. I went with a GForce and Nvidia drivers which, so far have not caused any problems, even when I installed the upgrade drivers. The ONLY time I have ever had this problem was after trying to install ATI drivers !

Rob

Here one more story, just to mess up things a little bit more:
as I wrote previously I have a samsung drive as master and a maxtor 40g as slave on the primary channel. On the samsung I've got Win2k and on the maxtor first a fat32 partition of about 30g and afterwards multiple linux partitions that use the remaining space. The last time that I posted an entry in here I had about 12g left in the fat32 partition and I was getting all the time the error messages concerning the second hd. After many configuration changes I switched to linux and deleted some files that I didn't need anymore, switched back to windows and guess what....? No more error messages, until of course(?), I don't cross the border of the 14g left free - if I do the error messages in windows get back, but in linux I can fill the fat32 partition as much as I want - no file gets corrupted.
I tried out all the fixes posted on this page (even switching on the s.m.a.r.t. option for the hd) but nothing changed...
boh

I can't believe this thread has lasted since September, even harder to believe the software giants haven't corrected the problem.

Now, for my spin of the topic. I just purchased an 200GB external combo (Firewire/USB 2.0) hard drive from Western Digital. I hooked it up to Firewire, went to copy a file, and whammo, "Delayed Write Failure". What the hell? The drive disappears and the only way to get it back is to reset it. So I reset the drive, and tried again. Same thing. Reformatted the drive, same thing. Tried it on two other computers, no problem.

Hardware specifics:
AMD Atlhon 2200+
IWILL KK266 Plus R mobo
512 MB ram
80 GB WD IDE
20 GB Maxtor IDE
200GB WD external Firewire/USB 2.0 combo drive
52x CDRW LG
ATI Radeon 9000 Pro
Internal USB card reader (SD,MMC,CF,MS)
...I think that's it...

As I said, I hooked it up to my Gateway via USB 1.0, no problem, my laptop via Firewire, no problem. But it craps out on the IWILL/ATI/WD combination using Firewire. It works without an issue using USB 1.0, but man is it s-l-o-w. Maybe I should buy a USB 2.0 card and see if the problem goes away, although I'm not sure why it would. The Firewire card I have came with the Pinnacle DV software that I bought for my video camera. Could the card be the source of the problem??

Any ideas, I just dropped $350 on this drive and don't want to accept that it's a write-off.

Send me an email - Cheers.
jeff_monteith at hotmail dot com

Look at this response from WDC..................

Problem:
While using a FireWire drive in Windows 2000/XP, a "Delayed write error" appears. In addition to the error message, data corruption may occur on the drive.

Cause:
The exact cause is not known. We are currently working to determine the exact cause of this issue.

Resolution:
We have provided a workaround that is successful in many cases. Do the following for EACH device listed in Disk Management. This includes EIDE drives and CD-ROM drives, as well as the FireWire drive.

Access Disk Management.

Locate the drive listing in the top right-hand window. Right-click on the drive and select Change Drive Letter and Path.

A new window appears. Select the drive again and click Edit or Change.

DO NOT make any changes. Click OK or Cancel.

Locate the drive in the bottom right-hand window of Disk Management (this is a graphical representation of the drives in your system).

Right-click on the drive and again choose Change Drive Letter and Path and then exit the window.

After you have completed steps 1-6 for each device listed in Disk Management, restart the system.

***************************************************************************

Can I get my $350 back?

NO_NO _NO You lost that money !!

>>Any ideas, I just dropped $350 on this drive and don't want to accept that it's a write-off.<<

If you want to check the vid card, uninstall the drivers to the radeon 9000, switch to the internal graphics card (switching cables) and reboot. If you don't want to have wasted the $350 HDD, you may have to replace the 9000 with an $80 nVidia card.

Of course, if you remove the vid card and your situation stays the same, you will have to find another problem.

Bad form ATI. Bad form.

Good post Chris ,you know what I don`t understand is they make these PC`s so fast now and the truth about the matter is some of these vid cards work when you back off the speed of the Pc.Looks to me if a vid card does`nt work with a particular sys. they should have to refund or at the least exchange for one that does work with the sys. in question.

To add insult to injury, I live in Peru. A friend just brought this drive back for me and I have NO way to send it back or exchange it. I guess I could buy a new vid card on vacation next month - but the flipping Radeon 9000 card works great otherwise.

I'm going to the "grey" market this weekend and pick up a USB 2 card and see if that corrects the problem. WDC's cheesy little Answer ID#934 gives no indication of when we can expect a solution to the problem. Given that this post goes back to September, I would say there's little chance of getting this problem rectified - I feel like I've been rectum-fied.

Cheers.

Jeff I hope everything comes out allright.hehe

Well, I ended up buying a new USB 2.0 card and bagged the firewire card. Problem solved. Not sure why the firewire card didn't work but it must be some sort of a driver conflict. Unfortunately the USB 2.0 is not as fast the firewire --- but at least it works!

Cheers.

Just to throw another spanner in the works with this problem:

Abit IT7-Max2 v2 users have reported the same problems when using Maxtor ATA133 drives.

I had the same delayed write problem when I tried switching to 2 x 40Gb Maxtor ATA133 drives (I also had it on my 80Gb maxtor data drive). I promptly went back to my nice 30Gb IBM drives which I never had and still haven't had a problem with.

Without waffeling on too much more; all the research I did into the problem (I spent a week or so) pointed to one thing (This might only relate to Abit IT7's) pointed to the VIA USB2 controller. With this disabled in the BIOS things run fine. Turn it on, things play up.

Unfortuneately for me, I need the extra USB ports it gives me, so my IBMs are back in.

Yes I do have an ATI card, but this has only gone in recently, an NVidia card was in when I tried the Maxtors.

I was also getting the problems with out installing ANY drivers after an XP install.

And to add more confusion my drives are on my raid controler

System Spec:
Abit IT7-Max2 v2.0
P4 2.4Ghz
512Mb PC2700 DDR
2 x 30Gb IBM ATA100 Raid 0/1
1 x 40Gb Maxtor
1 x 80Gb Maxtor
ATI Radeon VE 64Mb
ATI Wonder TV Tuner

Well it just goes to show, I had all sorts of delayed write problems, way back in the beginning trying to install ATI drivers. See my posts near the top. After I built my new system I decided to do a clean Windows XP install on the system that was giving me all the problems. The funny thing is that starting out with a clean install I had absolutely no probelm installing any ATI drivers, including the latest Catalyst drivers.

Rob

I have a similar setup and have seen the problem, I know the culprit as well. I noticed this occurs with a ATI Catalyst driver ( I have a 9700) -XPPro - I have the same KT333 Ultra...the hitch is it only occurs with the following reg setting getting a "1".

HKey Local Machine/Current Control Set/Control/Session Manager/Memory Management/LargeSystemCache

When set to "0" you do not get the error, when you set it to "1" it occurs next boot.

I have tested this upside down and insight out at the expense of a reformat and test, setting my tweaks one at a time and rebooting. I have even removed the ATI card and inserted my old GeForce3 to test and when I set it to "1" it works fine....this leads me to believe that ATI is the culprit....

James

Antec 1080AMG with ClearPanel and blue LED
TruBlu530 PSupply - All rounded IDE - Thermal Take Volcano7
MSI KT333 Ultra - AthlonXP 2400+ - 2048GB PC2700
SB Audigy MP3+ - Radeon 9700 - HWood REAL Magic with remote
Promise TX2000 PCI RAID
2 x 60GB Maxtor D740X 7200 2MB 120GB RAID 0
1 x 120GB Western Digital JB Special Edition 7200 8MB
Lite-On 52x24x52
Pioneer 16X DVD
Altec Lansing ADA305
21" Trinitron IBM P260
Logitech MX DUO Elite/MX700 Mouse

I have a similar setup and have seen the problem, I know the culprit as well. I noticed this occurs with a ATI Catalyst driver ( I have a 9700) -XPPro - I have the same KT333 Ultra...the hitch is it only occurs with the following reg setting getting a "1".

HKey Local Machine/Current Control Set/Control/Session Manager/Memory Management/LargeSystemCache

When set to "0" you do not get the error, when you set it to "1" it occurs next boot.

I have tested this upside down and insight out at the expense of a reformat and test, setting my tweaks one at a time and rebooting. I have even removed the ATI card and inserted my old GeForce3 to test and when I set it to "1" it works fine....this leads me to believe that ATI is the culprit....

James

Antec 1080AMG with ClearPanel and blue LED
TruBlu530 PSupply - All rounded IDE - Thermal Take Volcano7
MSI KT333 Ultra - AthlonXP 2400+ - 2048GB PC2700
SB Audigy MP3+ - Radeon 9700 - HWood REAL Magic with remote
Promise TX2000 PCI RAID
2 x 60GB Maxtor D740X 7200 2MB 120GB RAID 0
1 x 120GB Western Digital JB Special Edition 7200 8MB
Lite-On 52x24x52
Pioneer 16X DVD
Altec Lansing ADA305
21" Trinitron IBM P260
Logitech MX DUO Elite/MX700 Mouse

Sorry about the double post.....

I have 2 identical 40gb maxtors, and a radeon 7500. I used to have windows 2k on one and just use the other for storage. When i started getting the delayed write problem, i ghosted the drive with the OS on it over to the other maxtor and the problem went away. However, if I use the original maxtor in any other PC i don't get the error.
Something else, all my drives are on a Highpoint 370 raid but are not raided together at the moment. The problem never occured when I had the two maxtors striped together.
In all cases I had SP3 and latest 4in1s and latest BIOS.
I haven't tried any of the things suggested above but i will do so now and let you guys know how i get on....

MY Machine:
2 x Intel Pentium III 733 MHz FCPGA
ABit VP6 motherboard (inc Highpoint 370 raid)
512 Mb PC133 RAM
2 x 40GB Maxtor DiamondMAX HDDs
1 x 8GB Fujitsu ATA66 HDD
Ati Radeon 7500
LiteON 32x CDRW
LG 16x DVD

I've done what James did above, and I can confirm that changing that registry value works... worked for me anyway. Recieved a barrage of errors with my Radeon 9500 card on third party Catalyst 3.4 omega drivers. Wasn't able to run the regedit or boot into safe mode. I switched over to my geforce 4 ti-4200 and everything booted up perfectly. I changed the registry value to 0 like he said, shutdown my computer, plugged in my radeon 9500, and now everything works fine.

Just wondering, but is there any setback in performance if the value is set to 0 instead of 1?

I thought I would add a few more kinks to the puzzle. I am having the same problem with a Maxtor 60gb drive. I have moved this drive to two different systems, both running Win2K so that rules out this being a WinXP problem only. Neither system has an ATI card, so that rules out ATI specifically. Also, got the same error using a LiteOn CDR and a Hitachi Desktar drive in a dual external firewire enclosure, so that rules out the Maxtor-Western Digital only guess. Anyway, I took this 60gb drive home from work that was marked bad. I hooked it up, formatted it and it ran fine for a week or so. For no apparent reason, the system with the drive installed crashed and wouldn't come back up. I removed the drive and the system booted fine. So I took the drive and put it in an dual external firewire case with an Oxford chipset and a Hitachi Desktar 120gb. I connected it to another PC running Win2k, reformatted the drive and started using it. No problems for a day or two then magically, the error reappeared. As soon as it appeared, I was unable to copy anymore data to the drive. Now here's the kicker. I bought the dual external firewire case to support both a hard drive and a CDR in a single enclosure. I had a Lite-On installed with the Deskstar and about 1 out of every 3 cds I would burn, would fail with the delayed write error. I tried changing the master/slave settings, order on the cable, no luck. I removed the CDR and put it in a PC, it worked fine. I use the Hitachi Deskstar in the dual case with nothing else attached and it works fine. So what does all this tell you? I'm not sure it can be narrowed down just yet, but honestly I'm leaning to a bug in Microsoft code. There are too many variables in the equation to be tied to a specific piece of hardware or software. I think Microsoft should do something to resolve this issue since it seems to affect many users.

Oh yeah, on the above post, I connected the external firewire enclosure to a third pc, actually a laptop running WinXP Pro. I still got the error. So that's three different systems, all with different sets of hardware, none with ATI, that exhibit the errors. Microsoft?