Spot's advice applies to any external device, whether connected via USB, Firewire, or PCMCIA card.

The specific problem of delayed writes can be eliminated by simply turning this feature off in Windows. Where this is done depends on what flavor (95/98/ME/NT/2000/XP) you are using. The Microsoft Knowledgebase should be your first stop for answers to any such quesiton:

Microsoft Knowledgebase

On some versions, you can disable delayed writes on the drive from the properties tab of each drive (in Device Manager).

Thanks for the posts...

How do you have dismount set up on your PC?

I'm using a P4 3.0, XP Pro with ADS Pyro 1394 kit

Kurt

On XP Pro a little icon will atomaticly appear in the taskbar's "notification" area whenever something new happens - in the case of an external drive that icon will stay there until you dismount it. You don't need to install anything, it is all automatic. When you want to diasbale thatdrive you just use the icon and you will get a pop up asking you what you want to shut down/dis-mount.

The fly in the ointment is SOME firewire drives, in MY experience the Maxtor external, is notorious and under some situations prevents you from safely unmounting it.

In other words you're not given a chance to safely unmount, Windows can hang as a result, or the icon normally in the notification area is either MIA or none fuctional. If that happens you have no choice other than to do a forced shutdown by pulling the plug or hitting the PC's off switch. This could result in lost of data, meaning one or more corrupted files, lost clusters, cross linked files or a scambled file allocation table. I was lucky in that I never lost data, but it probably was just a matter of time before that did happen.

SPOT's experience and some others are talking about firewire ENCLOSERS, which apparenly are more reliable.

Forgive me for reposting - but this is the thread I to which I was looking to respond - and, so, my response and my recent experience follows:

I know this is an old topic. There was an even more pertinent thread more recently, but I cannot seem to find it now. That thread was a warning concerning data loss as a result of WinXP flashing a write behind error. I recall the poster mentioned that the drive was no longer accessible, and that he lost all his data.

Well, I thought to myself after reading his post, that I had never encountered such a problem - I run three maxtor 80 gig units and two ADS enclosures.

Today, my firewire daisy chain inexplicably acted up on me - had trouble making all five drives show up in WinXPPro. I could dismount them all, then reconnect anyone of them, and I would get that reassuring ga-ding from windows notifying me of the "new" firewire device.

Kept persisting in my efforts until finally, all five drives were online. Experienced a write-behind error message from out of the blue, then, discovered that my most important folder on the affected drive was reported as no longer accessible - data no longer present - or something like that.

First thing I did was to simply walk away from my setup for a few minutes to relax and take control of my mounting frustration and feelings of despair. Then, I rebooted, and let Windows to its disk checking routine (I usually hit a key to cancel that operation).

Windows checked my D drive (that's the drive where WinXP is installed on my machine), and the problem drive. Found no errors in either, but, after running the check, my boot sequence went smoothly, and the drive was totally accissible once again.

I mention it here in hopes that someone else who experiences my problem might spare themsleves a great deal of frustration. Hope this helps.

Caruso