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Delayed Write Failed.

I got that little bomb of a message the other day. It came right out of the blue. I hadn't even installed anything new for over a month.

I had just finished capturing some DV video from my camcorder to my 160gb WD drive (about 8gb worth). That was fine for a few hours. Until that little window popped up. I couldn't even click on the window to close it. XP was dead right there.

I rebooted and was greeted with a BSOD.
Each reboot gets a BSOD.
Not even Safe Mode works: BSOD there as well.

For a while I was thinking my big drive was dead, but I've since proven myself wrong. Which is a relief. I was starting to feel dumber than 9 chickens when it occured. I've google'd it, and numerous others have had this as well. Now I don't feel so bad.

A little about my system:

XP home with SP2

P3 1ghz (not overclocked)
768mb PC133 (not overclocked)
Soyo MB SY-7VBA133U (VIA chipset)
Nvidia GeForce 5500 running at 4x AGP (which the card is able to do).
2 - 90mm fans. One blowing in on MB, one blowing out. + 2 fans in PSU.
SB Live! Value PCI
Promise ATA100 PCI card. (which is intermittent) See below.
USB 2.0/Firewire combo card PCI
Adaptec SCSI card for my scanner PCI.
Ethernet PCI card.
33.6 modem ISA


Nec 1100a DVD+RW (secondary master on motherboard)
Lite On 52x CD-RW (secondary Slave on motherboard)

3 HDD's

Western Digital 160gb SE 8mb cache (primary master) on Motherboard with about 60gb of stuff on it. NTFS as 1 big volume.

Western Digital 60gb 2mb cache (primary slave) With about 5 gb free. NTFS as 1 big volume.

Maxtor 40gb 2mb cache on Promise ATA card. NTFS, 1 big volume with about 20gb free. This drive is not always detected as being there by the Promise card. It may be a power cord problem, but I'm not sure. I've changed its power connector several times and it keeps doing it.

I'm pretty sure that the enable write behind caching is enabled for the two WD drives.

Now, I'd been having a problem with my Primary Master (160gb drive) reverting to PIO mode from Ultra DMA 5. I've been having to uninstall the Primary IDE connector in control pannel to fix it. It's been doing this off an on for over a month now. No other drive is doing it. That in itself is pissing me off.

Then the "Delayed Write Failed" message really got me mad. I was offline for 3 days...feeling dumber than 9 chickens the whole time. Then the night shifts came, when I could search @ work for the answers.
The Delayed Write problem seems to affect ALL chipsets, INTEL included.
I'm not sure about the PIO trouble though.

Has anyone else had these experiences?

I was able to try out a few registry options (thinking it was solvable) in Repair Console. Nothing worked.

Enter my Norton Ghost image from Octorber 24th. It was on my 60gb WD drive. 25 minutes later I was back up and running with all programs and e-mail messages I had on the 24th of October.

Both of these problems are going to come back and haunt me again. I know it. I can 'feel' the system parts conspiring even now to drive me Nuts. Going crazy I can handle, but Nuts is over the line. What ever the problem was, I'm sure I cloned it with Ghost. I know it will come back.

Any thoughts on the matter?

Thanks,


Spazmogen

plenty of hardware.
what kind of PS are you using to power that rig?

350w Enermax.

I used to have another (aka a 4th) HDD in there. Attached to the Promise card as well.

It's run pretty good for a while now, until the PIO-Ultra DMA5 issue started.

Then that dredded window about write delayed failed.