Delayed Write Failure

[worldcitizen]

Hi Everyone,

I recently bought a new PC since I joined and posted here about another problem which you guys solved and I never forgot this forum as being the best tech support site I had ever visited. I lost the link to you but when I got a forum reply email I found you again and have made several backups so I can stay here for good and contribute.

The new PC is an Intel Pentium 4 2.6C with Hyper-Threading, 1 GB Ram, Asus ATI 9600XT Graphics Card, Abit AI7 Motherboard, Enermax NoiseTaker 430 W PSU, Sony CRX300E CDRW/DVD Read/ Sony DRU510AK DVD Writer, 2 x SeaGate 80 GB SATA RAID ARRAY 0, 1 x SeaGate 80 GB PATA, XP Home Edition.

PS:Just got the SATA drives yesterday so they are nothing to do with the problem.

The very 1st thing I noticed with the P4 was the number of times I experienced 'Delayed Write Failure' causing me to lose my OS and being unable to access Safe mode or System Restore or even use last good configuration. These are the ONLY type of crashes I've had on my new PC but I've had about 7 of these so far.

On my old PC, Intel Celereon 433Mhz I could load anything, install anything and play around with any setting and I never had this problem and it was using XP Home Edition also. But this machine seems so sensitive to everything installed or tweaks made. I had a good read of this problem on this forum and it is a major problem causing a lot of headaches for so many people:

http://www.hardwareanalysis.com/content/topic/2459/?o=80

After reading this I no longer use Tweaking Programs (a P4 is fast enough) but I did notice that the crashes usually occured after rebooting or installing large files. I may have tweaked cache settings before I as I used to tweak a lot.

Does anyone here have any advice they can offer about this problem because it is part of my P4 life now and it's the one thing that really spoils XP. I never had it before but now I'm always on the alert for it.

Thanks

Dave

[DMR]

There seems to be a relationship between the write error and ATI video card caching/performance settings. This is one quote I found concerning the problem:

"Are you using an ATI Radeon video card?
If the Performance options under system properties advanced tab are set to
large system cache or priority for system cache on Win XP this can cause
these errors with some of the Catalyst drivers."

More related links here.