"delayed write fail" and WinXP

I started getting "delayed write fail" pop-ups about a week ago. Now they are popping up almost daily. I have run chkdsk and there has been some disk and file corruption. I am hoping that if I disable disk cache in WinXP that will solve the problem rather than it being a hard disk about to crash. The problem is I am unable to disable disk caching even as administrator. The policies tab under the disk drive properties is greyed out and I am unable to change the setting. I have a Hitachi 80GB SATA drive connected to an ABIT NF7-S MB on the SATA connector. No overclocking has been done to this system yet. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

I am not sure how to ungray the policy on the cache. You may try to uncheck the lower box which enables writing to cache and then reboot. I can tell you that your HD is fixing to crash. I am sure you knew that already. I hope you backed it up. If not, you may have to many errors to do it now. Defrag the HD to see if it helps. If not, you may have to reformat the drive which should eliminate any bad sectors.

I know this may sound nutty, but I had a very stable XP Pro installation. No errors, worked great. The I installed Catalyst drivers using an older Radeo 7200. I started getting the "write delay failure" errors almost immediately. Had to boot into safe mode, remove ATI drivers and use the Microsoft driver. Computer has been fine since.

May be useful, maybe not.

Good luck.

The only time I have experienced that error is on a couple of our systems that rely on our main server for active storage, when the server was rebooted or network connection was temporarily lost, they would display that error. Otherwise it never comes up.

Thanks for all of your suggestions. The hard drive did crash right after I posted the message. I am glad I have everything backed up and ready to go. There seems to be a problem with SATA drivers and WinXP reported on the net here that hasn't been resolved yet. I am now back to the trusty old IDE drive and I am using the SATA drive as a backup and not for anything important.

"In MS article 816004, the 1st paragraph explains that the error "Delayed Write Failed" (for event 50) takes place whenever the software (filesystem) cache manager cannot write all the data to the disk, ...BUT it still flushes data from the cache buffers, and so the data is lost. The error is not due a failure in the hardware cache of the disk-drive or controller."