TIP: how I solved a "Delayed Write Failed" error on my USB

by frederic7 - 6/7/09 2:03 AM

TIP: how I solved a "Delayed Write Failed" error on my USB 2.0 hard disk drives

There are many causes and solutions for this problem but they did not help me when I had the problem on 2 external drives, and I found an original solution I would like to share.

One HDD was a Seagate FreeAgent, the other one a usb-powered Freecom drive.

The disks could be detected by Windows XP and sometimes would work for a few minutes. I would start coping files and suddenly get the "Delayed Write Failed" error message. By trying them on another computer, they behaved the same, so the problem was evidently the discs failing. But because this happened on both discs at the same time, with the freecom being brand new, I did not accept this conclusion entirely.

I booted my computer with a linux live CD (for example Knoppix - http://www.knoppix.org/) and there I could easily access my drives !!!!! So I formatted them under linux by typing "mkntfs /dev/sde1" (sde1 was the name of the drive in my case) in the console and this cured my Freecom drive, which has been working well for weeks now.

This did not work for my older Seagate, and linux could not even fix it when I tried "ntfsfix /dev/sde1". I guess it is really failing but I can still read the content under linux. I wonder if Windows somehow damaged them when I copied thousands of files and 100GB at the same time. I know use the TeraCopy utility to copy more safely.