Peter -

Can you give us details on the motherboard, raid controller, and hard
drive(s)?
I think you should be able to change a setting in the motherboard so
your system would require pressing the power button to turn off.
Your solution to restart and turnoff the power before it restarts will
work as well but that can be a pain to time it all right.
I wonder if it's the cache on the raid controller that isn't flushing
or the cache on the hard drives?

Mike
--- Peter Shkabara <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> 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
> [log in to unmask]
>
>
> -----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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