Delayed Write Failed

jeffk

I have two 2TB western digital drives and I have tried everything I can find on google with no luck.

Is there anyone that's managed to fix this problem? Is 2TB too much in one lump for xp?

JonathanAnon

jeffk wrote: »

I have two 2TB western digital drives and I have tried everything I can find on google with no luck.Is there anyone that's managed to fix this problem? Is 2TB too much in one lump for xp?

Whoooooaaa... back up the truck there... Did you add the drives to your existing Windows XP PC? Or have you tried to install Windows XP on to one of these drives... ?

jeffk

JonathanAnon wrote: »

Whoooooaaa... back up the truck there... Did you add the drives to your existing Windows XP PC? Or have you tried to install Windows XP on to one of these drives... ?

Sorry they are two external elements drive. I threw it out quickly as its driving me mad.

JonathanAnon

External as in USB?

jeffk

Yes they are external usb drives.

Odaise Gaelach

Could you tell us how you got the error message?

jeffk

Any way, like im doing nothing and up it comes,extract a rar up it comes,sync folders up it comes.

I unrared music, and the file I got the error on played ok.

Odaise Gaelach

Did you have a look at http://support.microsoft.com/kb/330174?

jeffk

I did thanks, they are brand new so I cant open them.
But after that ive changed stuff in the registry, the cache settings, network card settings, installer a 128k filter, uninstalled and reinstalled the drives/drviers, went into safe mode and changed all the permissions to everyone, uninstalled/reinstalled my antivirus, defrag and other preformance programmes. Tried the plug adaptors both ways.

Ive had a 300gb or so sea gate and two 1tb western digital drives and never had this error in 4 years, unless i just pulled the usb cable out.

Odaise Gaelach

Did you try them in someone else's Windows XP computer?

jeffk

No, I never thought of that, the brothers pc is older so id assume its gonna be more likely to throw out the same errors.

Odaise Gaelach

Please do and let us know how it goes. If you can, use the same power and USB cables for the external drives that you were using on your own computer.

jeffk

I will indeed thanks for the help.

As we speak im copying the drive back onto the original 1TB as when I went to partition it into two 1TB, partition magic said there where errors in the partitions and now the drives are yellow and have bad written on them in it.

JasperKat

my son bought a terabyte external drive from peats in town a few wks ago & it started playing up like yours with lots of different errors, someone told him to do a checkdisk on it, (sorry I don't know how exactly, maybe someone more knowledgable here can tell you) and it worked fine afterwards....
hth,
jasper

jeffk

JasperKat wrote: »

my son bought a terabyte external drive from peats in town a few wks ago & it started playing up like yours with lots of different errors, someone told him to do a checkdisk on it, (sorry I don't know how exactly, maybe someone more knowledgable here can tell you) and it worked fine afterwards....
hth,
jasper

Cheers jasper, I whipped the drive and am in the process of putting the files back onto it, but ill try that on the other drive.

Dulchie

Jeffk, can you specify the exact model of your WD external drive ?

Do you know what version of XP i.e. SP2 or SP3 is running on you machine ?
This may help pinpoint the problem

jeffk

Dulchie

Its a Western Digital 2TB Elements

http://www.wdc.com/en/products/products.asp?driveid=762

Im running xp sp3 on a dell dimension 3100c.

Dulchie

The following is from the Western Digital website,
Re: My comp only recognises one 2TB WD drive
"You should never try to use two identical hard drives at the same time on one system. Windows (and Mac OSX and most versions of Linux too) has a tendency to confuse drives of the same type. One good option is to use a similar but not entirely different drive - an example would be the old (pre-Smartware) My Book Essentials 2.0 or the newer My Book 3.0 (which will work as a USB 2.0 drive if you dont want to install the 3.0 card)."

This refers to external drives only. Xp may confuse the two drives since their device characteristics are exactly the same.
Another possible problem is the power management software which may have been supplied with the drives.
It is possible that a sleep mode is invoked after a preset time. The drive may be asleep when Xp sends it data, it should be possible to disable this setting in the WD software.
You might like to try renaming one of the drives so that they show up as different names in My Computer. This might solve the problem but I doubt it.

ricman

You could install linux mint from a livecd iso,and use that to make 2 partition on both drives,give em 4 different names,try formatting one partition in fat32.
run it live from the cdrom,can it see the two drives.
OR download ,use gparted ,it runs from a cdr.
SEE here http://gparted.sourceforge.net/
or see here ubcd,http://www.ultimatebootcd.com/
it has gparted built in, it also has partition hard drive manager.
MAKE one partition on each drive 499gig,some old pcs may not recognise a 2tb partition because of bios,limitations.
see here http://www.techspot.com/vb/topic35227.html
does the bios support 48bit lba.
TRY ubcd partition manager first.
Connect just one drive, make 2 partitions, and then reboot, go on to drive 2.
NAME each partition,eg part 1,2,3,4

ricman

See here
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/303013
enable 48bit lba in xp.donna if its gonna work,its for atapi harddrives.

jeffk

Cheers lads and ladies, just back from Wexford and a bit of files still left copying. Ill try those ideas as soon as its done.

I see the identical thing pops out, I had to identical 1TB drives so I doubt its that, but ill try naming them e and back up where I just had elements and elements back up. As I say ill try them all and thanks again!!!!

jeffk

Installed WD spindow as thats the only non formatting tool they have for the drive.
Checked the 48bit lba and the one I have is newer so the hotfix wont install.
Formatted and recreated both drives, maybe the factory partition clusters or the like didn't play well with xp/my system in general.
Have been copying and resetting up files etc and tip wood no problems, in fact it seems a bit snapper.

Time will tell....(fingers crossed tis sorted)

Cuddlesworth

A full(non-quick) format runs a checkdisk. I'm pretty sure you had bad sectors on your drives. Keep a close eye on them.

jeffk

Cuddlesworth wrote: »

A full(non-quick) format runs a checkdisk. I'm pretty sure you had bad sectors on your drives. Keep a close eye on them.

I deleted and then formatted the partitions on each drive and they where both empty when I started to transfer the files back across. I will indeed make sure, I use goodsync so that does detect and errors in files when syncing.