After two weeks of trying to figure out what was wrong, and having the Tier 1 CSR's tell me my drive was dead, I finally got to talk to someone much more knowledgable with the company who spoke in anonymity (sp?).
Here is what completely (four days and counting) fixed my "Delayed Write Failure" with my FreeAgent Pro 750GB drive using Windows XP.
KEEP IN MIND THIS IS A REGISTRY EDIT. BACK UP YOUR REGISTRY BEFORE DOING THIS. YOU RUN THE RISK OF HAVING TO RE-INSTALL YOUR OPERATING SYSTEM. (No i didnt have to...just felt it necessary to say)
1. Hit Start 2. Hit Run 3. Type "regedit". Hit OK. 4. HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE > SYSTEM > CurrentControlSet > Control > Session Manager > Memory Management 5. Search for the "SystemPages" and Double click. 6. In "Value Data", you may see something like c6800 or something along those lines. Replace this string with 8 lowercase f's (ffffffff) and hit OK. 7. Exit regedit. Restart computer.
If your PC successfully restarted (and it did for me), plug in your drive. TRY to break it. Send as much down the pipeline as you can (I played an uncompressed AVI file and skipped through several MP3's, the same stuff that would cause the "Delayed Write Failure" error in the first place). Chances are that'll fix your problem.
The guy I talked to said this is more times than not successful in fixing it.
The registry fix did not have any impact on this problem for me.
However, i did download a newer version of my Motherboard drivers which must have contained an update for the USB port. This seems to have fixed the problem. Just thought i'd let the Delayed Write Failure community aware of my solution.
After everything I've tried to fix these dreaded errors, this simple 30second regedit fix totally corrected the problem with the "Delayed Write Failed" errors. Thank you for posting this Shawntempesta, you are a gentleman and a scholar.
See the Common Issues thread at the top of this board for delayed write failure troubleshooting. That fix is included therein, and it's for all external USB drives.
Hey, I have been battling with the same problem and believe I have resolved it differently to that above. If you go into Computer Management to Disk Management and right click on the external drive. Then click on Properties. There is a tab titled Policy. If the drive is set for fast detachment change it to Write Cache option. The reason I think is that the data is written in one stream (in my case a backup) as it backs up with the former option and if the process is interrupted it fails with the dread write error. With the write cache on it writes in batches and waits until the drive is ready to receive again. Could be wrong but it worked for my situation and the backups have not failed with this error any longer. It does mean you have to dismount the drive but then that is preferred practice anyway.
