Upon returning from France we purchased an external hard drive, as our old disk was failing, we had lots of pictures to back up, and we had experience with loosing files from not backing them up. I kept getting the error "delayed write failed." This was when running it in Windows XP. I looked on the webs for answers. The easiest one out there seems to be the solution to my problem. Here's the solution copied from a Microsoft support page. It involves deselecting "write caching" on the disk.
To resolve this issue, first check whether the "Enable write caching on the disk" feature is turned on. If it is turned on, turn it off. To do this, follow these steps.
Note If you turn off the "Enable write caching on the disk" feature, your hard disk may perform more slowly and may affect the overall system performance of your computer. Because of this, you may want to monitor system performance after you follow the steps in this section.
To turn off Enable write caching on the disk, follow these steps:
1. Click Start, and then click My Computer.
2. Right-click the hard disk, and then click Properties.
3. Click the Hardware tab.
4. Click to select the hard disk, and then click Properties.
5. Click the Policies tab.
6. Click to clear the Enable write caching on the disk check box, and then click OK.
7. Click OK to close the Local Disk (C:) Properties dialog box.
8. Repeat steps 3 through 5 for each hard disk that is installed in your computer.
If these steps resolve the error message, you are finished.
Well, like I said, that seems to have done it for me. I had to restart after making this change. Good luck. ps --- I still get the message, "The device ... cannot be stopped right now. Try stopping the device again later." This solution is available from the iomega website:
1: Disable the Recycle Bin for your Iomega Drive
1. Right click the Recycle Bin and select Properties.
2. Click the option for Configure drive independently.
3. Click the Iomega drive tab.
4. Click the option for Do not move files to the Recycle Bin. Remove files immediatly when deleted.
WARNING! Files deleted from the Iomega drive will no longer be in the recycle bin, but will be deleted immediately.
5. Click the OK button.
I can not use it at this time, though, because I got rid of my recycle-bin icon and can't find it now. D'oh!
But wait! I visited this web page, and used the instructions there to edit the registry and get back the recycle-bin icon. When I was doing that I saw my old attempt to do the same thing, and I had apparently created the right registry entry to get back the recycle bin, but I had failed to put the brackets around it, so it wasn't working. There now, got the recycle bin disabled on the external hard drive (eep!).
Here are the instructions I used for removing/restoring the recycle bin:
To delete the Recycle Bin icon from the Windows XP/2003 desktop follow these steps:
1. Open Registry Editor.
2. In Registry Editor, navigate to the following registry key:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE'SOFTWARE'Microsoft'Windows'CurrentVersion'Explorer'Desktop'NameSpace
3. Find the following key:
{645FF040-5081-101B-9F08-00AA002F954E}
Delete the above key.
Note: As always, before making changes to your registry you should always make sure you have a valid backup. In cases where you're supposed to delete or modify keys or values from the registry it is possible to first export that key or value(s) to a .REG file before performing the changes.
4. Close Registry Editor.
There is no need to reboot. Just wait a few seconds and see how the icon disappears from the desktop.
5. In order to restore the Recycle Bin icon to the desktop just re-create the missing key (or import it back to the registry in case you've exported it earlier).
In Registry Editor, navigate to the following registry key:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE'SOFTWARE'Microsoft'Windows'CurrentVersion'Explorer'Desktop'NameSpace
Create the following key:
{645FF040-5081-101B-9F08-00AA002F954E}
(just copy/paste, including the brackets).
Done!