Firewire drive "delayed write failed"

[Ephibian]

I'm having a total puzzler of a problem here. I have a Smartdisk Firelite portable external 1394 hard drive that is giving me errors.

I can plug the drive in and access it fine, until I try to copy any large files off of it. Anything above 5 mb, it brings up the "copying files..." dialog, then craps out with a load of error messages that say "delayed write failed" and (file)"could not be copied due to an I/O device error"

I've tried the drive on 3 computers. Two of them, running XP, it has this problem. The office computer is running 2k SP3, and the drive runs like a charm on it. I wiped and downgraded my computer to 2k SP3, and it still acts exactly the same as it did under XP.

I haven't been able to find any information about errors like this, so at least some pointers would be greatly appreciated.

 

[THX1139]

It sounds like either a Firewire port or setting is not where it needs to be on the computers it is failing on. First, are the firewire ports using the same IC chip? Also, have you looked at the settings (stare & compare) between the two computers (one which works to that one that does not under W2K SP3)?

 

[jamesbond007]

Do you have a lot of external (USB/FW) devices? I had a Zip250 USB give me that same error when I had it connected to my notebook. When I unplugged all devices except the Zip250, the error went away. I'm thinking there's not enough juice going through it to support all of the devices, at least that was my problem. Is this FireWire port a built-in port on the computer or is it bridged through another device, like a SB Audigy? Is the FireWire card/port sharing an IRQ with another device? Possibly try another PCI slot?

Good luck!

 

[linster]

I'm having this exact same problem, except it's with a USB 2.0 enclosure with a 9.5mm HD. Doing a search on google comes up with disabling the write cache as a solution. I've done this and it does not help. I've also tried unplugging all my USB devices and moving the device to other USB ports and the problem is still there. I'm out of ideas here.