Failed Delayed Write?!

[TheraEdge]

OK, so I'm watching the 4 hour (extended version I believe) movie of the new Battlestar Galactica when it was about halfway recorded so I could jump through all the comercials. Everything seems to be going fine for about an hour and bamb some error that locked up sage completly, and then shortly after windows. I had to do a hard restart. Also, this morning when my qife got up she mentioned that it had said there was an error and I had to restart it, but it seems I still got my shows recorded due to the service running.

Oh, I should tell you what I am running..I have a nice little Athlon 2100+ system running 2 Hauppauge 150MCE cards and a 200GB Seagate hard drive, running windows 2000 (would have done XP, but I only have so many legal versions of different software, and my 2 XPs are spoken for, and I sure wasnt' going to use 98SE...)...I thoght a nice setup...the video card is kind of just a stand in until I get a good one following getting this thing running and some of the bugs worked out.

Anyway, so after the hard restart(the second restart of the day) I got back into watching, and nothing really happened for about another hour or so...hard to remember as viewing time doesn't allow with real time due to cutting comercials, but I was still watching the 4 hour show and sage was about an hour into recording the series premier after that which was 2 one hour shows best I can tell. Anyway, all of a sudden I get a pop up that says windows delayed write failed. WTF darn it, I'm not having a good day with sage. so I click OK, another pop up, OK, another pop up OK...Ok...OK...OK...OK...OK...OK...so I tried to force quit the delayed write and sage and didn't get very far because after my ctrl-alt-delete and trying to click system manager the system froze!!!YIKES I'M MISSING MY SHOWS ARGHHHHHH! Anyway, another hard restart. After sage was back up, I used the remote to jump about 3 hours by pressing the skpfwd2 button a bunch of times, well, that locked it up, but I think it was because I was pressing rappidly and not letting it catch up...I think I confused it, so lets restart again. Anwyay, so now I didnt' get the 2 hour premier because it lost the first hour because of this stupid delayed write thing I guess... So I checked the event log. There were about 2500 Information types in there that said delayed write failure. So, my question is, what the heck happened, and how do I fix it?

[Opus4]

I don't know if this is really the problem you are having, but the last time I started getting delayed write failures, that hard drive was in the process of failing completely. The first thing I would do is try to save any data you want to keep from that drive & run the manufacturer's diagnostics to see if there really is a hardware problem.

- Andy

[TheraEdge]

A friend had suggested this smart drive software that seemed to tell me it checked out, but I'm not sure ow good it is. Thanks for the suggestion, I am downloading a tool from seagate's website right now. The drive was a brand new 200GB drive less than a month old now I believe...I need to head to bed now though, so I will try to run the test tomorrow.

[Opus4]

Originally Posted by TheraEdge

A friend had suggested this smart drive software that seemed to tell me it checked out, but I'm not sure ow good it is. Thanks for the suggestion, I am downloading a tool from seagate's website right now.

The SMART test report isn't really good enough for me. The Seagate software can do a fast test like that + an extended, more complete, test.

The drive was a brand new 200GB drive less than a month old now I believe.

It still can happen... I've had them fail when new out of the box, within a month, within a year, etc.

But, hopefully I'm wrong & a drive failure has nothing to do with it.

- Andy

[hufnagel]

If you're getting Delayed Write error messages, don't hesitate to replace the hard drive immediately. Speaking from experience, ignoring those messages will only result in significantly more screaming and english language abuse than normal.

[TheraEdge]

Hehe, yeah, I know what you mean, this may be my first hard drive death though. We will see. Anyway, I forgot to mention that my system is set up on 2 hard drives...I have a 200GB Seagate, brand new for the shows, and an older IBM drive, which I believe is an 8.4GB one. I wouldn't mind replacing it, but I don't need a huge honking one, wish they would just sell 10GB drives for like $15-$20 I bet they would get some decent sales...I set that drive up so I could run all the software on it, and just have the 200GB drive be the media drive. I'm not entirley sure, but I still think the delayed write was trying for the 200GB drive because that is where my shows are stored. Oh, and I also didn't mention that I am runing a motherboard with a RAID controller as well, so I put the software drive on the primary controller and the media drive on the RAID controller..anyway, ran all the test that came with the Seagate program. It sezs that:

Main Board IDE controller: Passed
Main Drive: Passed
Main Drive NTFS: Passed with inconsistencies (????)
Parallel ATA Controller 0: Unsuported
Seagate Drive: Passed
Seagate Drive NTFS: Passed


I think the unsuported in the RAID controller may just have been from the seagate scanning being unsupported because it seems to have been able to use it to check the seagate drive still with no issues there. I am doing a scandisk on the main drive right now to see if it picks up any errors or bad sectors, and possibly fixes them and then I will rerun the seagate checking program. I will also update the RAID controller driver for the system to see if that changes anything (if I can just remember what mainboard I placed in there now...hehe)

[heffe2001]

I would definitely test the IBM drive as well, if you had problems with the system getting into your control panel, it's possible that you are having a write-delay on that drive. Sage does write to the sotware install partition alot, and it could definitely cause you to have a bad day .

[TheraEdge]

Oh, sorry, maybe I wasn't clear about that. I ran scandisk on the IBM to see if it could resolve the NTFS file issue, since that was the drive that had the file system inconsistency.

[TheraEdge]

OK, following a rescan it looks like the scandisk took care of the NTFS problem on the IBM drive, but the RAID controller still comes up as unsupported. WE will see if I end up with the same problems I guess...

[mdmint]

If that old 8.5GB HD is suspect check Pricewatch! You can get a 10GB 7200rpm ATA Maxtor for as low as $26.65 inc. s/h.

[sleonard]

Were/are you using power management to put the server to sleep? I tried to set up PM to sleep and wake my server but as soon as I did I would get delayed write errors whenever the server was awakened. I had to disable PM because of this and as soon as I did the delayed write errors went away.

[robertmcox]

For some drives (I think it might be based on the disk controller), you can disable write caching in Windows -- look at the "driver" properties for the disk device (not the disk controller) in device manager. On one of the tabs, there's a check box to disable write caching.

You might also try a surface scan:

chkdsk c: /frv

[TheraEdge]

Nope, no power management, it actually happened when I was watching a show if you read the original post...I am not planing on even tring the power management due to the issues I have heard other people have with it...I am planing on fiting it out as a server and using a silent client PC.

Hmm, OK, so this is odd, for the disk drive that seemed to have the problem, the Disk Properties have the "Write cache enabled" greyed out...hmm, maybe the RAID controller doesn't allow it...There is a SCSI Properties tab that has checkboxes to disable tagged queuing & synchronous transfers. I was going to see if I can get into the bios a bit here and look around for the RAID controller, but it is recording new shows right now...

[heffe2001]

You will definitely take a large performance hit if you turn OFF delayed writes. You really should try to fix whatever the problem is that's cause the delayed write errors. It's possible it's a drive going bad, could be ram going bad, could be mobo going bad. Basically all delayed writes are is a disk-cache type thing. If I remember correctly, basically XP holds data to be written in a buffer, when the buffer fills up, it writes to disk. It could be the memory in the PC that's holding the write buffer going bad, it could be the cache on the drive going bad, could be a cable going bad, pretty much anything.

I'd still point to the older drive being the problem. I'd also try changing out IDE cables, making sure to use a 80 conductor cable for the larger drive.

[robertmcox]

I apologize if I missed it, but what RAID controller do you have?

Have you verified you have the latest motherboard BIOS (which should include the integrated RAID BIOS)?

Do you still have problems if you connect the big drive to the non-RAID IDE?

[TheraEdge]

The motherboard is an ABIT KD7-RAID board, and the controller is a HighPoint HPT372 ATA RAID controller. I actually just had another Sage lockup with Sage just playing back a file off of the drive on this controller, and no other recording going on. A friend suggested I just take the drive off of the controller to see if I have any more problems with it, so we could possibly factor out the RAID controller, but if it were to work, that would mean abandoning the raid controller I guess. I also wanted to set this box up as a sage server later instead of just a stand alone sage system and also use it as a backup file server with a mirrored set of drives to protect my files, but it is starting to look like it would be a bad idea to use this RAID controller to do that.

The BIOS of the board is up to date, as well as every driver. I haven't hit a delayed write error yet again, but I have been being cautious around my shows so I wasn't watching big programs while recording other programs in the background. This will not due forever though, and I intend to figure out the problem so I can use the computer as I wanted to use it.

All the cables are ATA 133s, I will try changing them out to see if that helps at all.

I think not being able to check the box for write caching on the drive on the RAID controller could have something to do with the delayed write problem, but it is questionable as to if this actually is prohibiting the delayed write or possibly just don't have an option to mess with it. The grayed out check box is unchecked however, which would direct me to think that write caching is not supported by this onboard controller.

[stanger89]

VIA + Highpoint, that's just asking for trouble IMO.

[mdmint]

Originally Posted by stanger89

VIA + Highpoint, that's just asking for trouble IMO.

I'd have to agree with you one that, the worst of both worlds. Over the years I've had solid results for simple mirror controllers with Promise. First original FastTrak, then FastTrak66, now FastTrakTX2 (in Debi's PC). For more advanced RAID5 PATA and SATA controllers I'd say Escalade, Promise and Adaptec all have solid products.

[robertmcox]

I think your friend's suggestion is an excellent troubleshooting idea -- eliminate the raid controller (and the cable while you're at it). If it's the Highpoint, then at least you know and can move forward troubleshooting the raid or investing in different/better equipment. It sounds like you don't have a mirrow now anyway. If the drive does it on another disk controller, then that's easy enought to repair.

[uthungover]

I had the exact problem,tons of delayed write fails and lockups during playback. I was using a PVR 350 card with striped array on a hpt372 pci controller. I had identical problems when using the WinTV2000 software. My theory is it's not Highpoint, VIA or SageTV, it's Hauppauge. The odds of their drivers being compatible with other harware is a crapshoot at best.

Originally Posted by mdmint

I'd have to agree with you one that, the worst of both worlds. Over the years I've had solid results for simple mirror controllers with Promise. First original FastTrak, then FastTrak66, now FastTrakTX2 (in Debi's PC). For more advanced RAID5 PATA and SATA controllers I'd say Escalade, Promise and Adaptec all have solid products.

Be carefull, most Adaptec cards use Highpoint's controller.