Try turning off write cache for external drives. You might still get an error, but the new error should give you a better idea of what the problem is.

wally heser wrote:
>
> I have two HD, each split into two drives.
>
> Have run out of room, each drive only has about 120 to 330mb available
> space.
>
> So I bought an external firewire/USB Maxtor 160 gig drive.
>
> But everytime I try and copy files to it, I get a 'Windows Delayed Write
> Failure' message and nothing gets copied to the new drive.
>
> Tried burning to cd enough to clear over one gig of space on each drive, but
> still get the same thing.
>
> Have also tried both copying whole folders and smaller files or pieces of
> folders, again same problem.
>
> Am running XP pro w/SP2, 512 meg ram.
>
> Any ideas on how to make it work?
>
> Thanks,
>
> WALLY HESER
> wheser@pacbell.net

--
Mike Walsh
West Palm Beach, Florida, U.S.A.

wally heser wrote:
> I have two HD, each split into two drives.
>
> Have run out of room, each drive only has about 120 to 330mb available
> space.
>
> So I bought an external firewire/USB Maxtor 160 gig drive.
>
> But everytime I try and copy files to it, I get a 'Windows Delayed
> Write Failure' message and nothing gets copied to the new drive.
>
> Tried burning to cd enough to clear over one gig of space on each
> drive, but still get the same thing.
>
> Have also tried both copying whole folders and smaller files or
> pieces of folders, again same problem.
>
> Am running XP pro w/SP2, 512 meg ram.
>
> Any ideas on how to make it work?

Sounds like space is really too limited on the current drives for Win to
be able to do its stuff. Try reducing the size of the rubbish bin to a
minimum via its properties, that'll give a fair bit of space probably
(in supposing that is it reserved, which I beleiev it is). Get rid of
all uneeded files too of course.