Comments on: Windows – Delayed Write Failed

By: Stephanie

Stephanie — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 09:05:14 +0000

Three days ago I got that message again, but this time I was in a hurry and forgot to put the drive into a USB ramp and used the computer’s USB slot instead (which is in the front of the computer and has easy access). One of you suggested that using the same USB slot as the printer, for example, could cause problems. So since then I bought a ramp and dedicated one of the slots for my drive and since then have had no problems except three days ago.

By: Vern

Vern — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 15:58:42 +0000

I’ve read the various solutions here and those that came up in Google searches, but I’m reluctant to start fiddling with every drive and cable. There were three things done last evening that preceeded me seeing this error message: (1) I plugged my external firewire/usb combo drive into an external USB hub rather than back into the computer’s onboard USB port; (2) I set up dual monitors, which included re-enabling my onboard video card (SiS), and (3) I let WinXP install one of those every-other-day updates. It seems whenever one of MS updates is installed, I get a new motherlode of error messages and quirky behaviors. I have found the best thing to do is not do anything! I’ve noticed a number of people say they hadn’t actually lost any data. What I will do is unplug the external drive from the external hub and plug it back into the computer to see if that makes a difference. If it does, I’ll post the result back here.

By: phil

phil — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 08:42:00 +0000

Update:
seems not to be the success i first thought last night. After running OK for over an hour the thing crapped out again.

I’m now starting to think its a straitforward impending drive failure. Repartitioned and reformatted again, no bad sectors etc, yet when the drive gets to about 50Gb capacity, things go to bits.

Will keep trying and if i get a resolution short of fitting a new drive i’ll let you know.

By: phil

phil — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 00:06:53 +0000

guys,

if its any help, I have a 160Gb Medion ext HDD USB which ive had for over a year now and until yesterday has worked OK. Away with work, i tried to copy 5 Gb of data to it y/day and after a few Mb the drive stopped responding and died. I then get all sorts of delayed write failure messages. wasted nearly an hour trying various things, all to no avail.

As it was plugged into the works laptop which has no administrator functions enabled, I had to wait till today and sort it at home.

Having checked the unit, i found some bad sectors and reformatted it. No difference. changed it to FAT32 and rformatted. no difference. started looking on the net. the write enable is greyed out, although I have turned off the write enable on the 2 int HDDs (which have always been on). all the highlighted fixes, reg edits etc didnt work.

eventually, in desperation, i opened my drivekiller (swissknife v3) and deleted the partition, and reformatted.

problem solved.

my home PC is running win2K with sp4 and most updates. currently copying all 40Gb of music MP3s in one go no probs.

all i can deduce from this is that there was some issue with the partition.

hope this helps all those who are suffering.

By: steven

steven — Tue, 13 Jan 2009 16:41:25 +0000

To Muaz: You say you have the same problem. What hardware do you have attached? Did you do what I suggested by turning off power to printer when using a usb drive? I suspect the conflict might be that my Epson printer needs the installation to take place from the cd not windows internal program. But I just resolved myself to work around it by powering down printer while doing backups.

By: Muaz

Muaz — Mon, 12 Jan 2009 12:17:15 +0000

I think my problem is exactly as steven described it – steven if u read this, please could u elaborate on what u said. thx a lot

By: Jason Bean

Jason Bean — Tue, 09 Dec 2008 20:59:49 +0000

I thought that was probably an issue as well, but I tried all my USB ports multiple times. Could be I just confused Windows more though.

By: andrew

andrew — Tue, 09 Dec 2008 20:33:16 +0000

hello – my DWF problem was caused because I was plugging in my external HDD via USB using the port that my printer had been connected to (without restarting Windows). So I guess Windows was confused that it was getting HDD data instead of printer-ish data? Anyway, plugging the HDD into a different USB port solved the problem :)

By: Stephanie

Stephanie — Sat, 18 Oct 2008 16:46:48 +0000

I’m Googling now as I just got this problem yesterday when I hooked up my Samsung WE Box 500 (bought in France), a multimedia box to be used for films, etc. I have two new external removable USB drives (500 and 250 gigs) that are on all the time. When I attached the WE Box, I lost one of the removable drives and with that famous message being displayed. I panicked and reset the system. The second time I lost the second removable drive. On both resets, the WE Box was detected. I didn’t like that DWF message so I removed the WE Box, reset the system and all was OK. Since then I’ve attached the WE Box to a spare old laptop and didn’t have any problems. The only problem is that the performance is pitiful–too slow for anything and you know how large video files can be! To get any files onto that WE Box, I send files over via the wireless network. I wonder if there are other solutions so I can use the WE Box on my regular system.

By: steven

steven — Sat, 11 Oct 2008 02:30:24 +0000

I would turn off all other usb devices and see if the error disappears. If this resolves the problem than try turning on one device at a time until you isolate the cause. I suspect that a device is polling the port at the same time the file is being transferred.