Delayed Write Failed error message after backing up with version 11

This sounds as though your motherboard or new PCI_E card is not a happy bunny.

First, do you overclock your PC or does it run at the BIOS default speed?

Second, it might be that the either your power supply is becoming electrically noisey or perhpas the main filter capacitors on your motherboard are beginning to show signs of stress. Unless you are knowledgable about electronics don't touch the power supply, but have a look at your motherboard and see if any of the capacitors have bulging tops or brown sticky gunge on or around them.

The capacitors will be upright and cylindrical in shape and will probably be the tallest components on the board, there will often be two or four of these tall capacitors in a cluster. They will have a coloured plastic film on them and one side will have vertical ---- markings.

If any of these show the above signs they should be replaced. If they are the cause they are allowing electrical spikes into other parts of your motherboard which could not only upset permenantly your motherboard but also peripherals attached to the bus.

Again if you are competent with elctronics you can replace these yourself - make sure replacements are low ESR type. If not find an electronic repair place who can do this for you.

Also check that all cables are making a firm connection inside the PC.

If your external drives are powered externally, check you haven't used the same power pack on all the drives that have failed. If the power packs are different then you might have a nasty electrical supply, not much you can do there, but one of these power adapters with mains filtering might help. Another common factor would be if you've placed the external drives in the same caddy, their could be a problem with the USB->S-ata/IDE chips or again the drives power supply on th elittle PCB that will be in the caddy.

The 'delayed write' error could be motherboard problem, RAM problem, hard drive problem or software, but bearing in mind two drives have died, I am inclined to think you have a hardware problem more than a software one.

***EDIT****

Should have mentioned, if your MB is newish and uses the 'solid aluminium' capacitors, they are less likely to be bulging and they won't be tall as I described above, they are more likely to be silver in colour and have a black stripe running from part of the top and down the side.

Thank you Colin for your reply. I'm not technically minded so I've attached some images of my PC in case you can spot anything obvious going wrong with my computer's components. The PC was built for me 3 years ago using an Acer T180 motherboard. The PCI-E card is brand new.

I don't know if I'm overclocking the PC or not. The front has a blue panel with LED's on (see pc-panel.jpg image) but I don't know what they mean or whether I should change the settings. The Power icons flash from 0 bars to 6 bars continually and the Low/Mid/High icons do the same. The UP C/F button below it seems to control the Low/Mid/High icons so that I could set it permanently to one of these.

Both external hard drives have their own power supply. I've been reformatting my 250Gb external hard drive - it's been going for about 14 hours and is only on 65% - don't know if that's normal!

From those pictures, the capacitors look OK. They are the cylindrical black and plum coloured components. However due to the perspective caused by the camera angle would you just check the ones on the video card, I think they are OK, but the one by the video connector (markings in the photo of 737A down the side) might be suspect, but even if it is, the bulge isn't great and hasn't vented.

This leaves us now with a possible power supply problem or something I didn't mention and should have a temperature problem.

Formatting shouldn't take 14 hours not even with terabyte drives and you don't have one that size.

Are you using the same USB port each time? If you are, try changing the port preferably to one at the back of the PC. Do you have any card readers or external USB hubs attached to the PC? These won't affect the formatting, but can upset True Image whilst it is imaging.

How much RAM do you have, I see all four slots are used. There is a free RAM test utility called memtest86 it needs to run from either a floppy/usb/CD. This will test your RAM to see if it is failing, this might be the cause of slow formatting and the imaging problem, but won't be the cause of your drives dying. You need to run memtest86 for at least 12 hours and preferably 24 to get useful indications.

Try changing USB ports first and see if that makes any difference and unplug any card readers or external USB hubs or joysticks and see if the imaging comes good.

I can't tell from your first picture if the PC is overclocked or not, but the temperature shown is reasonable and so I suspect you are not using an overclocked PC (judging by the fact your fans look standard and are not heavy duty), you'd need to look at the BIOS screen or press the Windows button + Pause/Break keyboard keys to see what processor speed is reported and check that against the speed of the processor you were told the PC has.

I've been running TrueImage Home 11 for a few years with Windows XP (now using SP3)

When was last WindowsXP installed ?

Thank you once again for your assistance. I am posting on my netbook whilst the reformatting is still going on so I'll check the capacitors once the PC is switched off. Incidentally, I reformatted the external drive doing a Quick Format yesterday but I wasn't sure if this would be sufficient in light of the problem and so it is the Full Format which is taking so long and getting even slower, it seems - only on 67% now. Do you know what the difference is between the Quick and Full Format and does it matter if I abandon the Full Format altogether?

Re the CPU, the screen (Windows button + Pause/Break ) says
AMD Athlon (tm) 64x2 Dual Core Processor 5000+ 2.61GHz, 3.50GB of RAM

This tallies with my receipt with the exception that the RAM should be 4GB. I can't be sure but I think it's always said 3.50GB on this screen.

The other USB ports had a Bluetooth dongle in it and my scanner which wasn't switched on. When the 250Gb drive failed I don't think I had my 1Tb drive plugged in but if so, it would have been before I bought the USB 3 PCI-E card. Other peripherals are two monitors in my dual monitor card, my broadband modem in my LAN port, a dial fax up modem which isn't conected to my phone line most of the time, and my wired keyboard and mouse. Windows XP SP3 (my choice) was loaded onto my machine when I bought it in 2008.

I'm trying to recall what actually happened when the 250Gb drive went wrong. I think the screen froze during a backup and I couldn't do anything other than press the reset button (I hate doing that) to get the computer started again. The next day I was able to open up the G drive which is my 250Gb drive, however I couldn't access the particular folder where the backup was being placed. I then rebooted my computer and since then I haven't been able to open up the drive letter at all until the quick format yesterday.

Just a couple of points:
Hard drives fail, it's not if, it's when. Some go for years and years without a problem and others don't. External drives are a bit more susceptable to problems because they get carried around. Disks should never get bumped or subjected to any treatment that results in high G's being put on the drive.

What points to something else is that fact your second drive started to act up after 6 days. However, strange things happen and you should check the integrity of the the 2 external drives. Test them in your other machine and run chkdsk X: /r on each partition on the drive if more than one. Replace the X in the command with the drive letter of the partition. Be sure to check for the results in the Windows Event logger. You can also run this command in effect by right-clicking on each drive(partition) in Windows Explorer. Select Properties, Tools, Error-Checking. When the little window comes up be sure you also tick the bottom surface scan box. Being an external drive you shouldn't require a reboot to schedule the check but it will take some time to run.

Formatting a drive only amounts to writing a new filesystem structure on the disk which is very fast. The slow formatting does a read-check of all the sectors and can take a long time if the drive is large. You can stop the long format but then you should do the quick format to ensure that the filesystem structure is correct.

Your time is out of whack as Colin says. It could be because the drive is doing a lot of retries because of a disk or USB hardware problem or perhaps the drive isn't being seen as USB2. Although not usually necessary, optimum performance is always achieved with the rear panel USB connectors not the front ones on the case which have an extra length of cable. USB 1 is 40 times slower than USB2.

The Delayed Write can be caused by disk or related problems but unfortunately it is prevalent with USB external drives and there seems to be many reasons for the problem. One thing you can do is check in Device Manager. Look under Drives, Properties and Policies. It should be marked Non-caching. This means that the data is written to the drive as presented, it is not saved up and then written when it would be more efficient to do the write.

Although your system has 4GB or RAM 32-bit Windows can only use about 3.5GB of it and that is likely why it is reported. On my 32 bit W7 system it says 4GB (3.5GB useable).

Going by the description provided I would first do this:

- Get a new power supply unit of about 400W or higher capacity.
- Do a clean reinstall of Windows XP and other required programs.