CianCW
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Why are my IDE drives seen by Device manager as SCSI drives-Delayed Write Failure?
Hello, I recently installed a Western Digital 250GB hard drive. I now have 4 hard drives (sizes 20, 40, 160 and 250GB) and 2 CD/DVD roms along with my floppy A drive. The 20 and 250 are connected to an adapter card (PCI) which came with the 160GB drive and the other 4 drives are connected as normal to the motherboard. My problem is that I've been getting a "Delayed Write Failed" message for the 250 drive - for some reason windows wants to use this drive for temp files to install updates to the OS and IE6 and it keeps giving this message (If you know how to fix this problem too, that would be great). (Windows XP Home, 512MB ram, Pentium III, 930MHz)
I looked around on here for some solutions to that, and in the process discovered that in the Device manager that the 20 and 250 drives on the PCI adapter card are listed as SCSI devices, which totally blows my mind because everything I have is IDE. I wasnt sure how to know the Physical difference between SCSI and IDE but I just found a post that confirmed for me that SCSI cables and IDE cables are different and not interchangeable. All of my cables have the standard number of holes (two rows of 40 i think) and FIT the drives so there can't be some kind of mix up - as in an ide cable connected to a scsi drive, or vice versa.
I'd like to get rid of the Delayed Write failed error message, (or get windows to try and install updates using temp files on a different drive) and figure out whats going on with those two hard drives and how to get them back to IDE status.
Cian
I looked around on here for some solutions to that, and in the process discovered that in the Device manager that the 20 and 250 drives on the PCI adapter card are listed as SCSI devices, which totally blows my mind because everything I have is IDE. I wasnt sure how to know the Physical difference between SCSI and IDE but I just found a post that confirmed for me that SCSI cables and IDE cables are different and not interchangeable. All of my cables have the standard number of holes (two rows of 40 i think) and FIT the drives so there can't be some kind of mix up - as in an ide cable connected to a scsi drive, or vice versa.
I'd like to get rid of the Delayed Write failed error message, (or get windows to try and install updates using temp files on a different drive) and figure out whats going on with those two hard drives and how to get them back to IDE status.
Cian
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PS to my comment above,
I forgot to mention that I had to format this drive as NTFS when I got it, because it was not formated. I do not know if this is causing any of the problems but its something that is different about the 250GB drive from all my other 3 drives (which are all FAT32's). Cian
I forgot to mention that I had to format this drive as NTFS when I got it, because it was not formated. I do not know if this is causing any of the problems but its something that is different about the 250GB drive from all my other 3 drives (which are all FAT32's). Cian
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Followup - checked the MSKB article referenced in the first comment above - since my cable is correct I was looking at the second option in the article: disabling disk write caching for that drive. I followed the steps and under the policies tab for the 250GB drive, both options to enable and disable the disk write caching are "greyed out" and unavailable to me to change, although it looks like the write caching is "enabled" on this drive. So other than some way of getting the greyed out options back again, I'm not sure I want to mess with my BIOS which is the 3rd option. The 250GB drive is hooked up again on its own separate cable to the Promise IDE card, but I just got another "delayed write failed" message when system restore tried to save some settings on that drive. This is really annoying because I'm afraid I'm going to loose data on this drive or something - Yeah i have 3 other drives to move the data to, but I really dont want to eat the cost of this brand new, month old 250GB hard drive.
Follow up to Cyber's comment above - dont know if disconnecting the drive did this for me or not, but the TMP and TEMP entries under the environment variables point to my C:\documents and settings\Cian\local settings\Temp and \TMP directories. So maybe that fixed the problem with windows looking for the largest drive.
Something weird to me though, below in the "system variables" section, under "OS" variable the value says "WINDOWS_NT" I am not running windows NT, I have windows XP home - is this a problem?
Cian
Follow up to Cyber's comment above - dont know if disconnecting the drive did this for me or not, but the TMP and TEMP entries under the environment variables point to my C:\documents and settings\Cian\local settings\Temp and \TMP directories. So maybe that fixed the problem with windows looking for the largest drive.
Something weird to me though, below in the "system variables" section, under "OS" variable the value says "WINDOWS_NT" I am not running windows NT, I have windows XP home - is this a problem?
Cian
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I did check my cables and they are all 80wire/40pin cables so that is not the problem. As the second comment mentions, I am using a Promise Ultra series IDE card, however, I do not have any SCSI host adapters (as far as i know)-I only have the graphics card, sound card, Promise IDE card, USB 2.0 card, modem card, and ethernet card. Nothing on my pc is SCSI. The cable to the 250 drive is a little bent from alot of twisting and turning but I switched to a new cable so I'll see if that helps the problem at all-but this same cable was connected to the 20GB drive and I was not having any delayed write failed problems there. In the mean time, I unhooked the 250GB drive so I could use the windows update feature and my updates installed just fine. If anyone knows why windows was trying to specifically use the 250GB drive and can tell me how to change that I'd appreciate it. Even with the 250 disconnected, the 20GB drive on the Promise card is still coming up as SCSI on my device manager. I'm going to hook the 250 back up with the new cable and see what happens, then check that Delayed Write Failed article again. Once I try a few things I'll decide where the points go. Thanks Cian