HELP ME! 'Delayed Write Failed' Error!

[NSPIRE]

Whenever I start up my 'puter (at home, I'm at the local cyber-arcade right now) I get tons of Error messages, saying things like 'Delayed Write Failed: blah blah blah', where blah blah blah is somethin' sayin' like, "C://Windows... all data has been lost." Stuff like that.

Any ideas?!?! Please help! It's just about to the point where it is unusable (99%).

Spec.'s are as follows:

P4 2.8ghz
MSI Intel P435E 333mhz chipset (I think)
ATI Radeon 9800 (non-pro)
1 Gig. of ram --> 2 sticks of 512 mb...
Fire2Wire Wireless DSL w/router

Any ideas?

 

[RandomPING]

A virus might have corrupted your stuff. Or maybe your hard drive just went bad.

Two options you have though. Pop in your windows install disk and use the repair option, and that might fix everything up. If that doesn't work you can simply reinstall the operating system.

Option 2, get another hard disk into the computer with a clean OS, set it to the master and the other to the slave so it will boot off the clean OS, then run disk doctor, virus scan, and maybe defrag (yea i know, but it can't hurt) on the other disk.

But it sounds like you have lost a lot of the data on the disk to make windows run, or you have a virus. Or the disk has gone bad, either way, it's going to require either a new disk or a new OS. Either way i'd hook up another drive to save what you want as a backup and do a reformat reinsall of the operating system.

I hope this helps.

 

[NSPIRE]

Well, the thing is, I know it's not a virus, because I didn't download anything recently, nor have I been doin' anything that could give me one.

I looked it up on Microsoft's support site, and on Google, and there's lots of tips... so I'm gonna' go try 'em.

BTW, the drive hasn't gone bad, either, it passed the Maxtor test thing.

 

[NSPIRE]

Anybody know a way to change the Harddrive (Maxtor 80GB) to FAT32, instead of NTFS? I've heard it's really hard with WindowsXP...

Anyone?

 

[Noodlygod]

As far as I know Partition magic would do it but you'd have to get into windows to install that. Otherwise I can't think of any way to do it without wiping out the partition and reformatting it.

I've got a couple of questions...
Can you get into safe mode? If so have you tried a restore point? And did you try the repair install?

Also, does the hard drive come up in BIOS? (It'd be under standard cmos setup) And if so, do the heads/cylinders look alright?

 

[Maxi]

The drive is curropted. Or the data is. Get those fridge magnets off your case!

 

[Sgt.Igneri]

It could be a virus. Do you have any sort of firewall at all? People can nail you with a trojan and have access to you computer. All you have to be is connected to the internet to get a virus.

 

[NSPIRE]

Well, as of right now, I can still get into the computer in regular Windows mode (not safe mode.) And yes, the local removeable hard-drive shows up in the system BIOS. And about the cylinders and head settings, I'm pretty sure they're set automatically, like on default. I've tried running system BIOS defaults, but didn't seem to make much of a difference.

About the sys. restore, I tried but it said that there were no previous restore points or somethin', and what was this 'repair install' thing ya' talked about Noodly?

And Partition Magic... does that wipe out all the saved data on my hard drive... 'cause, well damn, I've got TONS of stuff that I can't lose *NO, NOT Pr0n, lol*.

Is it possible that there's a problem with the settings of my Wireless DSL ISP? It seemed to have all started when I fiddled with a few settings in the Intel Net Adapter properties thingy... I'm not sure, though! Since then, I also get the message (the topic's message) and my Wireless DSL doesn't work anymore (I'm on my 56k right now)

Firewall? Nope. Norton Antivirus 2003, yes. Full-scanned last night, found nothin' except my own hacking tools, and those were deleted just 'cause I haven't used 'em in a few months , so that's why I think they could be related. Any ideas?

It seems like when the 'Delayed Write Failed' message(s) start comin' up after startin' Windows XP, that the NDETECT.exe process in the Task Manager seems to be slowing the computer down a lot, takin' up like 90-99% of the system resources. Any ideas? Relations?! HELP?!

 

[Sgt.Igneri]

To repair install: Get the windows XP disc and boot from it at start up. Then go through the reformat/formatting process and youll get toa point where you can "repair" windows.

Im pretty sure that it restores all default registry files, things like that.

 

[NSPIRE]

Wait... won't reformatting / formatting erase all of the info on my hard drive?

 

[Sgt.Igneri]

Not when you just repair windows.

 

[hyenolie]

i think if u dont particion the drive it wont erase the whole hd, if u just repair it deletes the shit u have on ur desktop remakes windows files but everything on ur harddrive C:/ will all be there.

i had this problem once, i ened up doing it twice. u have to select a particion from the dos screen.

 

[Noodlygod]

Reformatting the drive WILL erase all information on the partition as will deleting the partition. The repair option for windows XP should appear before you erase the hard drives and it basically replaces all of the windows files but leaves your files/programs alone.

Partition Magic has a partition conversion utility that SHOULD just convert the file system from NTFS to FAT32 without data loss but I think there is a risk there.

While I was looking around last night I came across a couple of people who had the error and fixed it by changing there AGP Aperture size in BIOS to 64 or below. So if yours is above 64 you could try changing it and see if that works.

What happens when you try and go into safe mode? Although I guess if you don't have any restore points that wouldn't really help you anyways. Although in older versions of windows just booting into safe mode would replace certain files and fix some problems. But I'm not certain if that's still true for XP. If you don't have any restore points it sounds like the restore function is disabled so I guess you're out of luck there. I would try the repair option. And theres going to be 2, and I can't remember exactly which order they're in but one will bump you to the recovery console and the other will actually go through the windows installation again. You want the one that goes through the installation again which I believe is 2 but don't quote me. But if you have anything you want to save DO NOT format or delete your partitions! Anywhoo keep us updated and good luck! -Noodly.

 

[NSPIRE]

Thanks Noodly. I'll try to see what I can do. I'll most definately keep you all updated on what happens, lol.