I got a LaCie 1TB USB 2.0 external drive a while back. I copied files to it without a problem. Then the other day I wanted to move a whole bunch of videos from my PC’s 80 gig internal IDE drive to that USB external drive. After copying a couple gigs, the copy process stopped with the Windows error “Delayed Write Failed…“, as shown in the next picture…
(link to Abhishek's image, see below)
I retried in case it was a fluke, same thing. I was using the amazing TeraCopy for copying so I thought maybe it had a bug. So I tried using the Windows regular copy (the one that starts when you do select files | control-C | move mouse to destination folder | control-V), same problem. Sometimes it wouldn’t even copy more than a few hundred megs. Clearly I had a problem.
After a lot of search on the web, reading through posts by users, and reading solutions that didn’t apply (mainly, caching was already disabled on my drive), I was beginning to think there was no solution, it probably was just my PC that was getting old.
Then I found this post by Abhishek. This provided a 99% solution to my problem: once done, the copy went through 40 gigs uninterrupted. I did not need to reboot my computer. Then the same error occurred. After that, it could only copy a few hundred megs before showing the error again. So I repeated the check/fix, only this time, I only checkmarked the first option, ie the “automatically fix file system errors”.
With only the first option checkmarked, the check/fix took only a minute instead of several hours. And it worked again! The copy completed (another 30 gigs) uninterrupted. Note that checkmarking the second option (scan) causes the “phase 4″ check/fix to be executed, which requires several hours since it scans your harddrive, so it was a real relief that the problem was (apparently) with the filesystem itself (probably the file allocation table or such) and not bad sectors on the drive.
BTW I highly recommend TeraCopy over the Windows XP native copy process. TeraCopy will automatically check all files it has copied or moved (via CRC check) and mark those that don’t match. Only 5 (out of 450 files) had error in my case so it was straightforward to pick those and re-copy them. Also, you can repeat a copy and tell TeraCopy to only overwrite files that are older than the copied one, which is basically a “resume” operation. At the end it checks the CRC of all of them, even those skipped in the new run. Finally, TeraCopy is several times faster than native Windows copy.
I also found this set of pages by Gibni which has a good summary of all possible causes, though Abhishek’s solution was not mentioned there. Abhishek’s solution does not address the problem, it just provides temporary relief. Three solutions that are amenable from Gibni’s summary are
- disable System Restore on the USB drive (currently enabled)
- see if there is any BIOS setting related to UDMA (don’t know, but unlikely)
- power management, don’t turn off the drive (currently not set so unlikely)
