Windows delayed write failed message

[Angus Comber]

Hello

I have a 1 year old machine with new disks. I bootup Windows on a C: drive
and I hold my data on a 400GB SATA hard drive - E: drive.
Sometimes when I boot my PC it is really slow and I get these messages:

Windows was unable to save all the data for the file E:\$Mft. The data has
been lost. The error may be caused by a failure in your computer hardware
or network connection. Please try to save the file elsewhere.

When this happened this morning I could see my E: drive in explorer but
could not copy files to another drive. I rebooted and all was OK!

This is a brand new hard drive. Is my hard drive really faulty?

Angus

 

[DSG]

This exact thing happened to me last week - same messages- including after
reboot, everything was okay. I went investigating to see if I could prevent
this from happening again. I don't have a 400GB SATA drive. I do have a 200
GB external drive via a firewire connection.

First of all I found the firewire connection at the external drive is very
loose and happened to just fall out that day. Fixed that; then went to
Device Manager > Disk Drives > Select your SATA drive and double-click. The
dialog that comes up gives you a Policies tab. Two options are given
(1) Optimize for quick removal
(2) Optimize for performance.

Because of the explanations with each of these choices, I chose (2), because
it permits caching in Windows instead of directly to the other drive, which
gives you a little security time-wise.
DSG
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