finsmaniac02

OK guys, I will start off by saying I am brand new to the ATI videocard scene. I just got my first card today, and its a radeon 9700 pro. Well, I had a buddy who has this card and installed the new omega drivers and they helped him out A LOT, so I figured that I wud just put those drivers on. Well, i installed the "hacked" drivers and BAM, can boot up, keep getting an insane amount of "Delayed Write Failed' messages. It drove me nuts.... WELL..... I found the problem. There is an option in the control panel/system/advanced/settings (under the performance section)/advanced. The option is entitled "Memory Usage" with 2 options, system cache, and programs. DO NOT let it be set to "system cache", that is the kiss of death.
It appears that this delay write error actually corrupts your hard drive bit by bit!!! Everytime it happens, ur getting worse off, so i suggest being VERY careful with this setting (especially since the only way i got back into a working windows environment was to put in my old video card, not even safe mode worked!!!)
Then things got bad again, i went to www.tweaktown.com and checked to see if i had done the tweaks that I had meant to do to make windows XP work better, they have some good tweak guides there that help a lot. WELL, there was one tweak, called "large cache" or something like that. It had you go into the system registry and had you change the HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Contro l\Session Manager\Memory Management\LargeSystemCache
value to 1. Not good THIS ACTUALLY SETS THAT OPTION I PREVIOUSLY MENTIONED BACK TO SYSTEM CACHE INSTEAD OF PROGRAM!!!!!!!
trust me, I found this out the hard way, and i was screwed again. I dont know if this kind of thing happens on all drivers, or if it even happens at all if you dont use the 9700-9800 hack, but I wanted to let people know so they dont have to go through the agony that I had to go through. Hope this helps anyone who needs it, peace

Dom

Yeah. Happened to me once or twice also.

cOoLeRgUy

this doesnt happen to me but I had to check if the memory usage is on Programs or System Cache so this is the breakdown:

• go to "System Properties" (or press windows key + Pause/Break)
• go to Advanced Tab > click on Settings in the Performance Box
• go to Advanced Tab > tick Programs (instead of "Background Processes" / "System Cache" in both "Processor Scheduling" and "Memory Usage" boxes.
• click OK.

hope thats correct.

JLP

I also had problems with large system cache enabled and Radeon 8500. Before I had a Matrox card and I was always runing with this setting enabled as it helped a lot wih video editing. No problems at all Then I bought Radeon 8500 and it also worked just fine with the very first drivers that came on CD with the card. But then after some time I decided to upgrade drivers and a few days after that I wasn't even able to boot into Windows. My NTFS partition was corrupted and I had to reformat the drive and install windows on fresh. At first i din't change the setting and all was runing fine with new drivers. And after some time I decided to switch the setting on to help me with performance and soon after that another corruption. I played a bit with this and It appears that all is working fine if you don't enable this and if you have the very first Radeon drivers. It also works fine with matrox G400 and I also tried some nVidia card and it also worked fine. Well i hope that ATI fixes this serious bug as soon as possible. ata corruption isn't a nice thing.

Dawnrazor

I've seen articles in a couple of places saying this is an XP issue that can happen randomly regardless of your video card or system cache settings. I've had it happen to me twice, and I don't have large cache enabled...

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Dyre Straits

I've ALWAYS had the Properties set to Performance for both Programs and Memory.

However, I've recently started having this "Delayed Write Failed" message and have run several disk checks, etc.

Now, I don't know if it has anything at all to do with it, but this error seems to have started since my last Windows Critical Update. Has anyone else started getting this since then?

I'm hoping to get to the bottom of it as it's driving me nuts!

I can download files and save to my networked computer just fine....just not to either of my 2 hard drives in the XP computer.

Now, here's another consideration: Microsoft says to Disable Write Caching on the Hard Drives. However, when I check the Properties and Policies options, the ability to turn it off is Grayed Out. I can't disable write caching at all. So, does anyone know how to do this?


Thanks!

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