Need help ( Delay Write Failure)

[Don Whitten]

As I have been editing my video on my external hard with my laptop I got this error:
delay write error. can not write E:\$BitMap. As I was dropping a clip into a new project file and PE 3 was generating the peak file I apparently lost my connection to my external hard. I am connected to the external hard wire via firewire. PE3 froze up on me and I had to reboot. Now I keep getting this error and can't even recognize my external hard drive.
Anyone else run into this problem using an external hard drive? It is formatted ntsf, I have 200 gig free on it, I use it for all my source files.
Every time I reboot my laptop I get this error and it doesn?t show my external hard drive. Now that is kind of frustrating as it stops me right now from editing a video. Needed a break anyway as I am just now getting over a bad flu I caught when I got back my vacation but any help anyone could give would be appreciated. Thanks everyone!

[Steve Grisetti]

Have you tried booting up your computer without the drive connected (to clear the connection) and then connecting it so that Windows recognizes it?

Meantime, if your Premiere Elements project somehow got corrupted, you can recall one of the Auto-Saved files (assuming you have Auto-Save turned on) and, at most, you'll have lost maybe 10 minutes work.

[Don Whitten]

I did try rebooting without it connected and then reconnecting it. Every time I reconnect the hard drive it then tries to write some temp file and I get the error.
It was the start of a new project as I added a new file in and PE3 was in the process of generating the peak file for it so I didn't lose anything to speak of.
I have been trying to find that file it is trying to write but so far no luck so I can delete it.
Interesting problem.

[Steve Grisetti]

You can also try actually deleting the USB or FireWire connections in your Device Manager. This will force Windows to reinstall the driver, using a fresh one, in case that's been corrupted.


To do so, right-click My Computer, select Properties, then Hardware, then Device Manager. Expand the "tree" to see your USB drivers (or FireWire, if that's how you're connected) and just delete them all.

Plug your drive in and Windows will reinstall the drivers within a few minutes.

[Chuck Engels]

If the drive is USB capable try connecting it via USB instead of Firewire. Also you could run Scan Disk on the drive to check for errors, there could be a bad sector or other problem. You do need to have Windows recognize the drive first though but when you do run this test;

Detecting and repairing disk errors

You can use the Error-checking tool to check for file system errors and bad sectors on your hard disk.

Open My Computer, and then select the local disk you want to check.
On the File menu, click Properties.
On the Tools tab, under Error-checking, click Check Now.
Under Check disk options, select the Scan for and attempt recovery of bad sectors check box.
Notes

To open My Computer, click Start, and then click My Computer.
All files must be closed for this process to run. If the volume is currently in use, a message box will appear prompting you to indicate whether or not you want to reschedule the disk checking for the next time you restart your system. Then, the next time you restart your system, disk checking will run. Your volume will not be available to perform other tasks while this process is running.
If your volume is formatted as NTFS, Windows automatically logs all file transactions, replaces bad clusters, and stores copies of key information for all files on the NTFS volume.

[Bobby]

I am going to go out on a limb here, but are you putting your files in the root folder of the driver, rather than a sub-folder? I.E. are you using only e: rather than e:\something?

If so, that may be your problem. You can only have a small amount of files in the root - even though you have tons of storage available, you can't use it.

[Don Whitten]

No I am using a sub folder on the drive. After some research on the net it seems that external drives have this error pop up once in awhile. I disabled the write cache on the drive and so far that seems to have fixed it. I'll know for sure when I do some editing this weekend.
I ran scan disk and it came up with no errors.

[Bobby]

OK - just a thought. You would be surprised how many people don't know about the root limitation. I see it a lot.

I was just going to tell you how to disable caching, but you seem to have done that already.

I haven't seen the problem myself, nor with any of my clients. But I do understand that it does exist out there. Hope it works out.

[Don Whitten]

It ended being a bad express card I using on my laptop (A Belkin). Replaced it with a Siig express card and the problem went away. Note to self: be leary of Belkin)