Please help me diagnose this Windows XP problem.

Factual Questions
1

For the last few weeks, I’ve gotten occasional “Windows Delayed Write Failed” error messages on my data drive, and at the same time the system would slow down significantly. It would seem as if it was locked up, but if you moved the mouse and waited about 30 seconds, the cursor would move a little, then freeze, and do the same thing about 30 seconds later. When I hard booted, everything was usually back to normal with no problems. Then it would happen again a few days later.

I assumed the hard drive was about to fail, even though no errors turned up on a CHKDSK, and Belarc Advisor reported its condition as healthy. So I bought a new drive today, set it up, and started copying data from the old drive to the new one.

But it did the same slow freeze. I tried several times, and it kept doing it. It also happened in Safe Mode.

I figured the old HD was just dying, so I resigned myself to having to do a restore from my last backup. (Yes, I do regular backups. No matter what happens, I will not lose any data.) So I removed the old, presumably failing, drive from the system, and started a restore. A few minutes in, the system got into the same slow freeze.

I had been assuming that a failing hard drive was causing the slowdown, but now it seems that something else is causing it, and the HD may be fine.

Any ideas on what could be causing it, or how best to troubleshoot the problem? I’m reasonably sure it’s not a virus. I have Norton Internet Security, up to date, with regular scans and no reported problems ever. (Please spare me the anti-Norton rants. It’s always worked just fine for me.)

I thought I would first try to let Windows repair itself, but I’d love your ideas and suggestions, especially if it will help me avoid having to completely reinstall Windows, which I just did about six months ago and would prefer not to have to do again.

Thanks.

2

Try plugging a different power plug into the drive. The one you have currently on the drive may have intermittent contact problems. You may also have a cable loose at the mother board or hard drive. I’ll leave it at those easy suggestions.

3

Could be something wrong with your RAM

4

8 common causes for ‘delayed write failed’ errors

Microsoft Knowledge Base article

The slowdowns sound like memory issues to me. Two issues from the 1st article are memory related.

If it is neither of those issues, it still sounds memory related to me - at least the slowdown part. Check how much memory your system is using when the slowdown occurs.

5

The simple fact that things happen in safe mode make a hardware problem a more likely culprit. I would be very curious to see what tasks are pulling the most CPU time and ram when those slowdowns occur.

How much ram do you have and in what configuration. (ie 2x1GB sticks, 1x256MB, whatever)

6

You mentioned a data drive: do you have a separate OS drive? Have you tried checking that? Can you post the full data from the event viewer entry?

7

Thanks for all the suggestions, and for helping my clarify my thinking. I agree that the problem is (or was) probably in the hardware, not the OS.

After leaving the system off all night, I checked and reseated the connectors for all the drives, and removed and reseated all the memory boards. One of the drive connectors was slightly loose, but that might have happened yesterday when I pulled the cage with the four hard drives out to look at them. (But even if it didn’t cause the original problem, it could have been responsible for the apparent worsening of the situation at that time.)

So everything seems to be up and running okay at the moment, but that’s what has happened every time this problem has shown up in the past. I had previously applied one of the fixes recommended on the Microsoft site: switching off System Cache. But at least now I have a couple more options to try if the problem recurs.

So thanks again, all. I was worried that I would have to spend most of the day today trying to fix this. I’ve got better things to do.

(But I’m also planning to buy a replacement machine in the next few months, too.)