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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