XPSP2 Delayed Write Failure with MyBook

[Fike]

I have been trying to backup my system with a Western Digital MyBook and various backup programs (WinZip, Genie Soft). For some reason, the process rarely completes successfully. I generally get a Delayed Write Failure when it is somewhere around half-way through. My backup is about 300 GB of data.

So, what have I tried:

• I ran an MS hotfix.
  I changed the write status in the driver.
  I used another My Book hard drive (I have two 500 GB drives).
  I turned off all power saving features.
  Changed compression level to less compression.

Any other ideas for me?

 

[Fike]

hmmm...this one is really buggering me up. I am kind of at the end of my rope. Maybe I need to dump my entire system and rebuild it from scratch to solve this problem.

 

[doan]

Some USB chipset are crap...try a PCI USB card or a diff USB cable

 

[doan]

Also, what file system is the external drive? if its fat32 try reformatting to NTFS

 

[0roo0roo]

yup 10 dollar usb card.

 

[Fike]

The file system is NTFS. I have tried it with and without the PCI USB card. I doubt it is the cable because it generally fails after 8-12 hours of working.

I have downloaded a program called USBInfo that is kind of cool. It helps debug all your enumerated USB devices. I have removed every USB device except the mouse, keyboard and hard drive. The mouse and keyboard are attached to the USB PCI card. The hard drive is connected to the motherboard USB ports. I am hoping to keep the devices from possibly conflicting. We will see what happens for this iteration. When you have a problem that takes 8-12 hours to show itself, it is a real pain to debug.

 

[Fike]

I disconnected all my USB peripherals and tried another backup. It worked without error. If it gets through the backup process 3 times without error, I will start plugging in USB peripherals to see when it starts failing again.

This is crazy!