Delayed Write Failure..

[Zer0Soul]

I'm on my 4th format.

I decided to format, after having the computer for a year and recently getting 9600xt and another stick of ram. I'm a big gamer.

The format went well, and I had everything installed again drivers,programs, the lot. I was able to restart and more. Then later on in the night after getting out of a utk3 game. I decided to restart. I got to the winxp login screen and a box appeared saying "delyaed write failure" plus alot of stuff it could not save. It would not let me login, or even enter safe mode..

I formatted again, after installing everything for 2nd time. It did it again in a similar style. I did it again..Now..im on my 4th install. I have instaled only the basics. My ati drivers,My via chipset drivers, plus directx 9. Everything seems fine so far, but even that's not for certain. Any ideas? suggestions?

 

[Hodsocks]

Check out http://www.hardwareanalysis.com/content/topic/2459/ maybe it will help you.

 

[RealBlackStuff]

Instead of re-installing from scratch everytime, invest in a program like DriveImage and make an image of your freshly installed basic Windows XP incl. the Service Pack 1 (don't install SP2 yet), directx 9.0b (mind the version) and the Via-drivers. Don't install the ATI-drivers yet. Make that image first.

Then next time you have problems, you can just restore your image, add new ATI-drivers and whatever else. This will save you an awful lot of hassle.

As for now, check all your PCI-cards, memory-sticks and AGP-card for being seated properly. Check that all your HD-, floppy- and CD/DVD-cables are connected properly.
Check that the cooler on your CPU is properly seated and that your temperatures are within reason. (go into the BIOS to read them out or use any other utility that may have come with your mobo).

Just remembered something, do you have any Maxtor HD in there? For a while they had problems with that. Could your HD is dying!!
Perhaps you should run whatever tests you can for your HD-brand and perhaps have a look ad HD-Regenerator (on the web)

 

[Shiney]

I had exactly the same problem only mine occured after changing my agp aperture size from 128mb to 256mb. I changed it back and the system booted fine with no errors?
I think the problem is memory related, try removing that new stick of ram and see what happens.