XP SP2 & Delayed Write Failed errors mystery

[bugsy71]

I have a dual core system that was working perfect and problem free for 3 years.
About a year ago, we had a power outage and during it, the power went off and back on rapidly about 6 times.
(The machine was ON when this happened).

Ever since then, I've been getting Delayed Write Failed errors on the internal 500GB Seagate (boot) drive.
Usually when dealing with large 1+GB files or doing video editing in PowerDirector but does happen spontaneously once in a while.
Being a technician for the past 25 years, I've tried all the registry tweaks, paging file size modification, etc.

About 3 months ago, I installed a new Seagate 500gb drive to rule out a drive malfunction.
For the past 3 months everything was fine and I've been doing video editing, etc with no issues.

Yesterday, while editing an .mp4 file with Powerdirector 8, I got the errors again and it practically locked the machine.
I reloaded the OS, etc using a barebone backup I had made immediately after installing Windows, SP2, drivers, etc..
I installed the programs I use normally (Powerdirector 8 and TMPGEnc AW 4) and everything seems okay except editing a video in PD8 seems a little slow and laggy.

I am stumped at the moment. I'm guessing an intermittent power supply failure or possibly bad memory.. perhaps even an intermittent problem with the SATA controller on the board but not positive. What hardware would be the most likely to cause this to happen?

 

[Emerald]

have you run a CHKDSK on the hard drives? Also use the Seagate diagnostic utility to check the SMART and drive

if you are not using a good surge-protector, i would test the PSU

 

[bugsy71]

Yes, ran CHKDSK on both the old and new drives. Also ran Seatools and both drives tested perfect. I may have stumbled on the fix last night.

I was investigating the XP tweaks that I had been tinkering with a while back.. if the SystemPages registry entry was set at 0xFFFFFF, would that cause delayed write errors?? I read somewhere on the MS website that it causes issues (didn't notice which ones) when it's set that high (the max). It's now set at a much lower value (0xBFFF) and we'll see if the errors pop back up after a period of time..

(Thanks for the info, Emerald)

Bugsy