delayed write failed error!

[Okasa]

Every time i try to transfer a lot of data across my LAN or with a direct connect via IDE i get a "Delayed Write Failed" error. Ive looked around a lot and ive found that three things cause it:
1)over 1gb of ram
2)very large harddrives
3)transferring large files

now, i have the error, and i have 2gb of ram, 576gb harddrive, and transferring a lot of data. but i cant seem to fix the error. i found that turning ok disk caching can solve the problem, and ive tried several ways of doing that, but no luck. has anyone else had this problem? if so, how did you solve it?

 

[nismotigerwvu]

I get that all the time when i use my external hdd for backing up the system....annoying isn't it....sorry...I'm looking for a fix just as badly as you are

 

[Okasa]

yea lol its so annoying. ive heard its a system cache problem, if that helps

 

[corkyg]

Yeah - the fix is easy. Go to Device Manager, select the external drive in question, and right click it for PROPERTIES. Then open the POLICIES tab and select OPTIMIZE FOR QUICK REMOVAL. That turns off write caching for the external drive - which will always screw you up because USB 2 just ain't fast enough.

Optimize for Performance turns Write Caching On. Not good for external drives.

 

[Okasa]

what about for internal drives? i mean, i did do that, all of my harddrives are internal and have been set to performance.

 

[RPB]

Thank You corkyg.

 

[npoe1]

Well, I have a problem with my Hard Disk, a Segate of 320GB, but I got the same error in one point of the last week, and restart the computer wouldn?t fix it, so I delete every partition and format the hard drive and did a ?chkdsk /r /p?just to be sure and the error puff, gone. I do not if this could help you

 

[corkyg]

Originally posted by: Okasa
what about for internal drives? i mean, i did do that, all of my harddrives are internal and have been set to performance.

You can't make that adjustment for Internal drives. They should never be a problem. If so, then something else is at work - maybe a bad cable or connector? Or as was said above - run CHKDSK on the drive. Could just be a corruption.

 

[Nothinman]

That error means the kernel failed to write some dirty pages to disk which is almost always indicitive of a hardware problem. Or if it's a network drive it could be a connectivity issue.

 

[Okasa]

yea so i get the error a lot, but only when im transferring like 20gb or more of stuff. when it happens, i restart my comp, delete the files i was transferring, and do a chkdsk to be sure, and that always gets rid of it. according to microsoft, it means that what was in the cache and was suppost to be written to the harddrive was actually not written when xp goes back to make sure it was written properly. thats why its a "delayed write" failure, it was in the cache, being 'delayed' and then wasn't written to the drive. thats why turning off disk caching is suppost to make it go away, but it dosen't seem to do that.

if it is a hardware problem tho, where would it lie? in the harddrives?

and heres a linky to the microsoft site about the problem.
http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=330174&sd=RMVP

thats where i got my info about what type of things cause the error according to microsoft.

 

[Nothinman]

thats why turning off disk caching is suppost to make it go away, but it dosen't seem to do that.

Disk caching will only delay the error, if there's a problem writing the disk it's going to show up whether you force the writes immediately or not.

if it is a hardware problem tho, where would it lie? in the harddrives?

Drive, cabling or memory are the most likely culprits.

Data corruption may occur if the Large System Cache feature is enabled in Windows XP.

This is one of those 'tweaks' that you have to enable in the registry on your own, unless you did that then that whole section of the article doesn't apply.

 

[Okasa]

ok its good that you seem to know what youre talking about, cuz im still pretty new to this type of problem. will running memtest on the ram test for this problem, or will it not because it only tests ram stability?

 

[xtknight]

One time when I changed the DisablePagingExecutive option to "tweak" stuff I got "delayed write failure" at boot-up and I had to reinstall.

 

[Nothinman]

memtest will only test the memory, if it's a drive or cabling problem you'll have to investigate those seperately.

 

[safsurfer]

Hey all, I just started getting this same error "delayed write failed" so I know how you feel, bummed I'm sure. But I think there is a blue sky. At least for me. All of my equipment is brand spanking new. I just built a media center pc, all brand new parts and all top of the line, mostly. So when I got he error I was like, "out of my mind". I did all the research on the net and tried and checked everything al the sites and experts recomended. Everything was set to exactly what it was suppose to. In the meantime, oh and I actually got the BSOD after the error message popped up, so my system crashed after that. So I rebooted and everything was fine, the drive was working fine, oh great one of those intermittent problems you loose hours of sleep over that haunts you until you just reddo everything. No really though, My system came up and did an automatic chkdsk and rebooted fine after that. So I thought, something has got to be the culprit. I have a WD SATA II 320GB HDD, 4GB Ram, pentium D950 all brand new so I know it's got to be something else. And it looks like it was, at least for the time being. The problem happened when I was transfering about 25GB of pictures from one HDD to the target HDD. I have 4 of those drives in my new system. One thing I learned, if you copy and paste to transfer at least you won't loose the data. If you cut and paste and get the error, good by good times, some of the data go bye bye. So since everything was set up correctly I had only one thing else to check, the cables. Sure enough, I have a bad cable, 1 in a million I know, but I would jiggle the connector right at the HDD during data transfer and sure enough the drive would fail. If I just left it alone it would receive the data fine. When I put a new cable on and did the jiggle test it didn't fail. So, luckily for me, I think my problem is solved. New cable, problem go bye bye. That was one of the things to check for from the microsoft site too and you had it listed above from the info you gathered. So, I guess it's always something to think about. I hope this helps in some way. Take care and have a nice day.