WARNING on Disk Caching

[Mike Fox]

In a boot display utility, I got a warning notice: "Disk Write Caching
Disabled". Couldn't find anything about this in my computer's BIOS
setup, so I'm wondering if this has anything to do with Win XP Pro?

Tried XP's Help but didn't turn up anything.

Thanks

Mike

 

[Ken Simmons [MSFT]]

Hi Mike,

Based on my experience, the problem may be caused by the following factors.

1. Hardware devices.
2. Third party software.
3. The failure of the hard disk.

Please try the following steps and let me know the result. We can narrow
down the
problem with these steps.

Step1. Test the problem in Safe Mode
-----------------------------
1. While your computer is booting up, press F8 to invoke the startup menu.
2. In the startup menu, choose Safe Mode.
3. Please let me know if the disk activity keeps high for several minutes.

Step2. Clean Boot your computer to test the problem
--------------------------------------------
1. Click Start and Click Run, and in the "Open" line, type in "MSCONFIG"
(without
the quotation marks) and click OK.
2. Under the Service tab, check "Hide All Microsoft Services", and then
uncheck all
the services listed.
3. Under the General tab, put a check next to "Selective Startup" and
uncheck all
of its sub-items and click OK.
4. Choose Restart to restart the computer.
5. Check the problem and let me know the result.

Regards,

Ken Simmons

Microsoft Technical Support for Platforms and Business Applications

 

[OneEye]

In a boot display utility, I got a warning notice: "Disk Write Caching
Disabled". Couldn't find anything about this in my computer's BIOS
setup, so I'm wondering if this has anything to do with Win XP Pro?

Tried XP's Help but didn't turn up anything.

Thanks

Mike

To check if you have write caching enabled right click my computer, select
properties then hardware then device manager. Once in device manager open
the disk drives tree, double click or right click and choose properties then
goto policies. There should be a option to enable write caching on the disk.
If this is unticked tick it then retsrt your machine.

 

[Alan]

Hi OneEye,

When I follow your steps on my XP Home machine, the option is grayed out. Is
this feature not always available?

Alan

 

[Peter]

Actually probably not what the MSFT suggests.. I had a similiar experience
and it is an anomaly of the way Windows XP 'sees' your HD, depending on how
it is cabled to your motherboard.. My disk caching was also disabled and
simply moving it to the Promise controller on the mobo solved that, and
while the bios does not recognize the hard drive, the Promise bios will,
although strangely, it also sees it as an scsi drive (which mine is not) So
if you have a Promise connector........................

 

[Old Geek]

He sees the error during the boot display - way before Windows has anything
to do with it.

Try again!

 

[Mike Fox]

You guys are great. OneEye showed how to check my caching in the
Device Manager, and Peter introduced me to Promise.

I have a nice homemade computer with three HDD systems. C drive is a
40 GB for the operating system and programs, and it shows caching is
enabled. F drive is a 120 GB catch-all for for playing around with
multi-meg image files, and it shows caching is enabled.

G drive is for all my data, and it is two 40 GB IDE connected Promise
SCSI/RAID Controler RAID 1 mirrored HHDs. G's Device Manager
Properties doesn't even show the box to check for caching and does
show it as a SCSI device.

It may be that disk caching in prohibited when the drives are used in
this environment. Anyone know for sure? This is a nice computer with
a AMD Athelon 2700 CPU, and I'm not suffering from a slow computing
that I can see--though faster is always nice.

Thanks

Mike