External USB hard drives and Windows XP

Iain Laskey learns of a curious cure for a common problem

I'm a fanatic when it comes to backing up my data. Having been burned (sorry) too many times with failing DVDs or CDRs and had my hard disk capacity outstretch any tape drives I could afford, I've come to rely on copying important data to additional hard drives.

Initially these were simply extra drives inside each machine and the cunning use of various utilities that copied folders from one place to another every night. It worked well enough but there was always a risk of theft or fire losing the lot. I clearly needed a more portable solution.

Like many, my next port of call was an external USB hard drive - a great way to add a chunk of spare capacity for very little outlay. I picked up a couple of cases with built in USB2 interfaces, put in the drives and connected them to my PC ready for a life of blissful backups. Little did I know I was entering a world of pain.

It became immediately apparent something wasn't right. The backups would always start OK then fail after a random period of time with 'Delayed Write Error'. A quick Google showed I was far from alone. Various solutions were suggested including driver updates, different ports, better quality external USB cases, better USB cards and more.

Over the next few months I methodically worked my way through it all. Whilst there was some improvement, the error always turned up sooner or later. Backing up my two PCs was talking almost a week of evenings, clearly no good.

More digging with Google then turned up an unexpected nugget. Someone (and I'm afraid I forgot to note who) suggested they had heard of several people finally cracking this problem by reformatting their external drives as an extended partition with a logical drive. Mine were all formatted as primary partitions so I converted them all using Partition Magic and much to my surprise, it worked. I left it backing up over 200Gb of data, repeating the backup three times before I could let a smile of relief cross my face.

I did the same for all 3 of my external USB2 hard drives and in the subsequent month of testing, each one has worked 100% without a single error. I have no idea why this fixed the problem but if you are having similar issues with Windows XP and external USB hard drives, it is worth a try, especially in cases where everything else has failed. And to whoever originally posted this solution - I thank you!

Iain Laskey
See Iain's site at www.pcbookreview.com