Hard Drive Issues- delayed write failed

Hello,

So recently I have been having problems with my firewire external hard drive. It has been working fine for months (almost six months I believe) when suddenly it started acting up. Just navigating through the hard drive would cause it to freeze, or the window would close, or the window would close and the drive would disappear from My Computer, or explorer.exe would freeze. All the data (several 100 GBs worth) is still there and it is functional, but I can only access the drive for a few minutes until one of these errors occur. Once an error occurs everything freezes up until I manually turn off the external drive.

EXCEPT, some research revealed to me that the dr. watson debugger windows utility was causing the freeze, so I completely disabled it. Now I still have the same problems, but all that happens is the drive closes, explorer.exe crashes, the external drive disappears, and then explorer starts again and I can keep using my computer with the external drive on and plugged in, but I can't access it. Also, after I disabled dr. watson, I now get two error messages before explorer.exe restarts:

Delayed Write Failed: windows unable to save all the data for F:\$MFT
Delayed Write failed: Recycler\s-1-5-21-602\62358...... the data has been lost

Some research into the delayed write failed showed that it might be related to the drive cache, because writing to the cache on larger drives can cause errors. So I went to follow instructions for disabling the drive cache which involved right-clicking on the disk drive in device manager and altering the settings from there when I discovered a completely new and weird problem. Both my internal hard drive and my external firewire drive are NOT listed under "disk drives" in device manager, but are listed under "unknown"!
I don't know if this is a recent change that I just missed, but I have been using my internal hard drive just fine for over a year (and I still am), so how can it be "unknown?" This creates a new problem because now I can't access the properties for my external drive (or my internal one) to disable the drive cache! What do I do!?!?!

ARG!

 

Try plugging it in, opening command prompt (CMD in the run box) and typing "Chkdsk F: /r" without the speech marks and see how that goes. Also try giving it a defrag just something you might aswell do.

 

Hey CaptainQwerty,

I ran the Chkdsk and it stopped at stage 4 and said:

"the disk does not have enough space to replace bad clusters
detected in file 3718 of name .

and unspecified error occurred."

After this happened the drive was no longer in my computer and explorer.exe froze and had to be ended in task manager, so I think my hard drive just did its delayed write failed error thing during the test.

When I analyzed the drive in defrag it said that the volume did not need to be defragged. I keep it pretty organized and pretty much just use it for backup of important files, school/work files, and media storage.

 

Hi, welcome to Major Geeks

What is the drive model?

I purchased an external Seagate FreeAgent hard drive a few years ago and had the same issues. I believe the issues were specific to that line of drives that came out... I never did sort the problem out (I should've contacted Seagate, but they make it very confusing to get support for external drives, so I just took it as a loss).

I ended up transferring the files to a different hard drive (it took forever because I could only access the drive for a few minutes at a time, most of the time), and binning the problematic drive.

 

My external hard drive is a 1TB Buffalo DriveStation Combo 4.
The model no. is HD-HS1.0TQ

It sounds like you had exactly the same problem that I am having. I would hate to try to transfer my near 500GB of files onto another drive when I can only use the drive (so far) for a maximum of ten minutes at a time!

 

Hi

My suggestion would be to at least back the data up to another drive, and contact the manufacturer for support. If you are able to get warranty service performed, they will return the drive without the data on it anyway (if it doesn't get completely replaced).

The only other option I can see is to continue using the drive.

You could try using Everest (download from MG here) to determine the SMART status of the drive.

Unless you can afford to lose the data though, I would definitely recommend backing it up onto another drive.

 

Hey mcsmc,

My problem with backing up the drive is that I can only access it for minutes at a time before it errors, so not only will it probably take me a week or more (working only a couple hours a day) but it is highly likely that I will miss data or that some data will only partially be copied over. I really just want to get it working somewhat stable so that I can back it up before sending it in to the manufacturer.

I wish someone could even just explain the problem to me so that at least I can understand what is wrong. Also, is there some way to disable the drive cache if it is labeled "unknown" in device manager?

 

Hi

I understand your difficulty! The drive I had to pull data off of was 750GB, and I'd filled it up quite a bit.

The only suggestion I would make, is it could POSSIBLY be a Windows-based issue (Linux might have better luck), so you could try using a Linux live CD and copy the files to another drive within the Linux environment.

If you're wanting to try this option, I'd recommend Ubuntu (easy to use, etc.).

Second option on this link should do the trick:

http://www.ubuntu.com/desktop/get-ubuntu/download