Big Problem: Delayed Write Failed.

[Turnsky]

basically what my second drive's been doing all day thus far, it's been having a hissy fit all day and i don't know why.

Been searching the internet to no real avail (most of the 'help' is about as helpful as a hole in the head)
so i was wondering, is it worth me trying to salvage the drive or do i take it out back and give it the 'old yeller' treatment.


do note that i did manage to salvage all things foxfire as it was my data drive.

'tis a seagate baracuda on a winxp sp3 system, on a gigabyte motherboard, the onboard drive controller appears to be an nvidia make, though i have no idea how to update the drivers for the controller, site's not helpful

most noteable error has it unable to save data for the file \$Mft.

[Tapewolf]

Can you run a bad block check?  No idea how that's done in windows - probably with chkdsk, but how you get it to tell you whether it actually found anything is a mystery to me.  Under linux you'd boot from a live CD and run "badblocks -v /dev/sda1" or something similar (where sda1 is the first partition on the first disk, sda2 is the second partition, sdb is the second disk and so on) - ideally it's something you'd do while windows itself isn't running just in case it interferes with the test, or it's Windows going wrong and not the disk (see below).

I'd also try to look at the SMART data from the disk drive if possible, since is has the drive's own diagnostic log and can detect an impending failure.

The only time I've seen that exact error was when we were running McAfee on a Windows 2003 server.  In that case the antivirus software was taking up so much of the CPU that the OS kernel itself wasn't able to run correctly and the disk subsystem was failing because it could no longer meet the hardware's own deadlines.

However, the most common cause of this is (IIRC from my research at the time) bad blocks on a failing disk.

[Turnsky]

However, the most common cause of this is (IIRC from my research at the time) bad blocks on a failing disk.

yeah, i'm pretty much writing this one off, it's just not worth it at this stage..


granted that leaves me short a 500 gig drive, however.

[Reese Tora]

Can you run a bad block check?  No idea how that's done in windows - probably with chkdsk, but how you get it to tell you whether it actually found anything is a mystery to me.  Under linux you'd boot from a live CD and run "badblocks -v /dev/sda1" or something similar (where sda1 is the first partition on the first disk, sda2 is the second partition, sdb is the second disk and so on) - ideally it's something you'd do while windows itself isn't running just in case it interferes with the test, or it's Windows going wrong and not the disk (see below).

If you're in windows, you would right click on the drive and choose properties, go to the tools tab, and pick the top option (error checking, check now)  you then need to check the option to scan for and attempt to repair bad sectors.

Once you OK out of that, windows may tell you it can't check now(if it's a system drive) but you can schedule a boot scan of the disk, and you get the save scan that gets run if you let windows do error checking after it crashes- you pretty much just have to watch.

I'm not sure what it does to a non system drive, because I normally deal with single drive, single partition computers.

also, "chkdsk [drive] /r" looks for bad sectors and attempts to recover data from them

Code Select Expand

CHKDSK [volume[[path]filename]]] [/F] [/V] [/R] [/X] [/I] [/C] [/L[:size]] [/B]