windows delayed write failed error message?

Question

Lately Ive been receiving this pop up message randomly every week or so - "windows delayed write failed error message..." and box says cant write to f disk for some reason. F disk is my external hardrive, which has also been automatically disconnecting and reconnecting VERY often, as much as every fe minutes sometimes. The external harddrive is only about one year old, a Seagate 80GB external harddrive, connected via usb port to my notebook computer running windows xp pro.

Answer 1

This seems like a very simple problem, all this sounds like to me is that you are not removing the external hardrive saftely, you do this when you insert the pen drive into the USB, and in the bottom right hand corner (Or on the right hand side of the taskbar, if you have moved yours) it will come up with a little hardrive picture, just right click and click remove hardware saftely, and then a message will appear saying it is safe to remove hardware, or it is not safe!

Thanks and i hope this has helped?

Answer 2

This is a result of the disconnections. Windows by default uses write caching to improve performance, which means that data may not yet be physically written to the drive when the operation reports to be completed. That's why you need to use the safely remove hardware icon before removing a device. You can disable it for your external hard drive by opening My Computer, right-clicking on the drive and choosing Properties, Hardware tab, select the drive, Properties, Policies tab, disable write caching/optimize for quick removal. Now, you still need to figure out why your external drive keeps disconnecting. Go to the Seagate site and download Seatools to check the drive, try a different USB cable, try uninstalling the USB ports and letting them reinstall on reboot.