Delayed Write Failed - Maxtor SATA 250GB

Okay, before I start I just want to mention that I haven't touched the hard disk in about 6 months, however, I'm planning on trying to get it working once more.

http://www.hardwareanalysis.com/content/topic/22061/

This thread seems to outline the issue a bit more clearly. You'll install Windows, and after a day or so it'll start giving you a little balloon tip saying "Delayed Write Failed" which will become more constant and eventually it'll end up in Windows failing to boot. Now I want to use my SATA drive as my Shuttle is trying to wean off PATA (the SN25P only has a single PATA IDE connection on the motherboard).

So is it simply a case of switching this registry key to solve the problem? Or is there an official fix floating around for this? I want to know because otherwise I'm going to end up reinstalling Windows many times which is something I'd prefer not to do.

Cheers

That is probably some isolated case.

From what I have experienced, delayed write failutre is mostly due to psu unstable output, cable or harddrive failure, or very rarely due to memory/cpu problem.

A friend of mine had tried every fix I could find for this, including RMAing his HDD.....

None of them fixed the issue and then after 3-4 months of the error his motherboard died. Replaced it with an almost identical board (both were NF4) and the problem has never re-appeared.

As arthur says (and digging around seems to uncover) there seems to be many different things that can trigger it.

So why doesn't the issue occur with my current hard disk?

If the option is there in CP, System, Hardware, Device Manager, IDE ATA/ATAPI controllers, <SATA controller name>, I'd disable commend queueing on the channel with the SATA drive on it. Worked for me with a 250GB Maxtor that didn't like Nvidia's idea of NCQ.

I believe it was nVidia's NCQ causing the issue in the first place. It's just a little frustrating when you've spent hours doing a setup then the entire install goes down the drain. Not only that but I'd prefer to move forward and start using the SATA drive and use my PATA as a backup drive for random data. Best bet would most probably be to test out installing windows etc. yet keep all my current data on the PATA drive, if the SATA one fails then just hook up the PATA one instead thus not losing anything whatsoever.

I would say this is an interface problem. This error is reasonably common on external drives.