Followup: "Delayed Write Failure", but disks seem OK

[Paul Moloney]

Have you recently had the computer shut off while you were working on it
or had a power surge?

Hi Nathan,

Not that I know of. A power surge is possible; at the moment
the computer is only on a normal extension cord.

The good news is
this is most likely not a hardware problem. The bad news is that you
may need to backup all of your data (if possible) and repartition/format
the drive and put everything back on it.

Finally, do you know which drive it is that has this problem or if it is
both?

Most of the error messages relate to the C: (boot) drive, but I have
seen one or two to my second hard disk F, and even one to G, which
is a removable USB drive. But the vast majority relate to C. I'm not
sure if that affects the diagnosis?

I plan to get a new hard drive (I'd been thinking of upgrading anyway,
this
gives me an excuse I guess), install it in place of my F drive, clone
my C
drive onto it using Maxtor's MaxBlast, and use it as my new boot
drive. Is this wise, or would cloning the drive simply clone the
problem?

Thanks,

P.

 

[Nathan McNulty]

See inline comments

----
Nathan McNulty

Hi Nathan,

Not that I know of. A power surge is possible; at the moment
the computer is only on a normal extension cord.

I would recommend at least a surge protector if not a UPS. UPS's can be
bought for around $20 (even for an APC brand which is what I would
suggest). That would be a good investment.

Most of the error messages relate to the C: (boot) drive, but I have
seen one or two to my second hard disk F, and even one to G, which
is a removable USB drive. But the vast majority relate to C. I'm not
sure if that affects the diagnosis?

I am surprised that an internal IDE Drive is having this error. I have
only seen this on External drives. There are quite a few things that
could be wrong with it. First, it may be a setting in the BIOS. Second,
you may need to change some settings in Windows. Sadly, some of these
settings may only be found in the registry which gets tricky.

I plan to get a new hard drive (I'd been thinking of upgrading anyway,
this gives me an excuse I guess), install it in place of my F drive, clone
my C drive onto it using Maxtor's MaxBlast, and use it as my new boot
drive. Is this wise, or would cloning the drive simply clone the
problem?

You can get a new drive and that would be fine. I would recommend
checking what the max specs of your computer are and buy accordingly.
If you need help with this, just post your system specs (especially
motherboard make and model) and I'll give you my suggestion.

I would not suggest MaxBlast for this simply because I am afraid the
problem is actually within Windows, not the hardware. This means that
your problem will probably be carried over. One thing you can do is use
the File and Settings Transfer Wizard to backup and move your Windows
settings and personal files (such as My Documents) over to the new
installation. Here is a nice little article on that:
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/using/setup/expert/crawford_november12.mspx

 

[Paul Moloney]

Well, in the end, I bought a new hard drive and reinstalled
Windows. This may seem extreme but I wanted to get a larger
hard drive and wanted to reinstall Windows anyway! So everything
now appears well. Hopefully I should be able to copy my old files
from my original hard drive once I hook it up.

As for the cause of the original problem, check Len's article at:

http://groups.google.ie/groups?q=le...m=#[email protected]&rnum=1

Since I also made these registry changes, and got the same problem
at the same time, it does seem like it _could_ be the cause.

(The registry changes mentioned can be found in WinXPNews at
http://www.winxpnews.com/index.cfm?id=134 under the heading
"How to Tweak the Registry to Improve XP Performance")

Regards,

P.