Thank you for your comments Mike. It let me review the situation again.
You may have touched on something I did not think of. My system has a
single partition of nearly 160GB. While this is within the acceptable
limits for NTFS, perhaps I am treading in an area that others with NTFS
(including my prior experience) have not been in before. How about it,
anyone else using NTFS with such a large partition and not having
trouble?

Unfortunately, I can't turn off the writeback cache because the RAID
driver does not allow for this. I already contacted Intel tech support
on this issue, but they have not yet responded. Their first response was
that the problem was not theirs since I was using non-Intel hard drives
- give me a break!

Also, I can't seem to bypass the shutdown mode without doing a
re-install of XP since the motherboard and drivers for it automatically
go to power down the computer. I have resorted to either keeping the
computer on in standby mode rather than shutting it off, or going
through restart mode and turning off power when it restarts.

I may try repartitioning the drive to see if that fixes the problem.
Alternately, I might just give up and start booting from a regular (much
smaller) IDE drive - that does not seem to cause problems.

Peter
-----------------------------------------------
The NoSpin Group
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-----Original Message-----
I know MS "fixed" a problem with large IDE drives under windows 98/ME
but I wonder if this problem is still happening on 2000/XP.

The problem would occur if windows wrote all of it's data to the hard
drive but it only went into the cache and not onto the drive.  The fix
for 98/ME was to build in a two second delay during shut down to allow
the hard drive to write the data from cache to the disk.

If all of the people who have not had this problem do not shut down
their systems or do not use power management to automatically power off
the system during shutdown and all of the people who do have the problem
do one or both of the above then maybe it is still the cache to disk
problem with IDE drives.

Back when this first came out MS said it was the manufactures problem as
they should have written in the drive someway to notify the OS that not
all of the data was written yet (even thought MS did provide a fix for
98 and ME).

To test for a fix you can
1. turn off disk caching (and take the performance hit)
2. turn off soft shutdown of your system (you will have to hit the power
button after the shutdown occurs) 3. never shutdown your system (not
practical for most home users)

Let us know if this helps!

Mike

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