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Delay Write Failed

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by etta250

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So I just ran the restore CD on my Compaq laptop (idk i think its a presario? it says EvoN180 on the screen). The laptop had crashed back in May and I can run restore disk and get it up again.

however, when i start downloading all of hte windows updates, i can get to about the service pack 2 download, and all hell breaks loose. sometimes (as in ive ran restore disk like 234598 times) it will download, but stop at the installation process, that it can't copy a .dll file. other times, "Delay Write Failed" comes up and the computer freaks out.

one time i was able to download service pack 2 properly, and get the rest of hte updates installed. but then i had the bright idea of running Check Disk, and it replaced a bunch of bad clusters (as well as take all night and day to finish). after running that check disk, the updates no longer downloaded properly. so i had it in a good state, then tried to make it better and made it worse.

I am almost positive that this is hardware - that the hard drive is no longer any good, but is there any way to help it?

Thanks for all your guys' time!

2 replies

by oh smeg

Get the HDD makers testing Utility and test the HDD. If it fails the test you know that it needs replacing and it will save you a lot of time & Effort as HDD are now cheap and easy to replace.

If you don't know the makers name you can use a generic Drive Testing Utility available fro Seagate called Seatools available here

http://tinyurl.com/yk8p3r

Or you can get a copy of the Ultimate Boot CD from here

http://tinyurl.com/3jnpy

And use that to test your hardware properly.

As for marking bad sectors on a HDD there used to be some old DOS applications that would do this but to be quite honest I haven't looked in a very long time for any of these as the cost of a HDD is so low that it's no longer worth messing around with as you burn up far more in Labor that you do in replacing a faulty HDD.

Col

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