Delayed Write Failed - could I have lost data?

[delerious]

Last night I was copying files from a Windows XP laptop to a USB external hard drive. Then when I tried to safely remove the hard drive, I got an error saying "Generic volume cannot be stopped". I've seen this error before and it goes away if I restart Windows, but this time I didn't want to restart, so I just put my laptop into hibernation, and when I brought it out of hibernation, I was able to safely remove the drive.

Then later I copied more files to the USB drive, and when I tried to safely remove it again, I got the "Generic volume cannot be stopped" error again. So I put the laptop into hibernation again, but when I brought the laptop out of hibernation, Windows displayed a dialog box saying:

Delayed Write Failed - Windows was unable to save all the data for the file e:\$Mft.  The data has been lost.  This error may be caused by a failure of your computer hardware or network connection.  Please try to save this file elsewhere.

My USB drive is drive E, and the $Mft apparently stands for master file table. That error seems to say that data was definitely lost, but when I ran a chkdsk on the drive, I got the following output:

C:\Documents and Settings\Administrator>chkdsk e: /f /v /r
The type of the file system is NTFS.
Volume label is Elements.

CHKDSK is verifying files (stage 1 of 5)...
File verification completed.
CHKDSK is verifying indexes (stage 2 of 5)...
Index verification completed.
Cleaning up minor inconsistencies on the drive.
CHKDSK is verifying security descriptors (stage 3 of 5)...
Cleaning up 12 unused index entries from index $SII of file 9.
Cleaning up 12 unused index entries from index $SDH of file 9.
Cleaning up 12 unused security descriptors.
Fixing mirror copy of the security descriptors data stream.
Security descriptor verification completed.
CHKDSK is verifying file data (stage 4 of 5)...
File data verification completed.
CHKDSK is verifying free space (stage 5 of 5)...
Free space verification is complete.

 625131831 KB total disk space.
 577839972 KB in 1884 files.
      1024 KB in 437 indexes.
         0 KB in bad sectors.
     87383 KB in use by the system.
     65536 KB occupied by the log file.
  47203452 KB available on disk.

      4096 bytes in each allocation unit.
 156282957 total allocation units on disk.
  11800863 allocation units available on disk.

That chkdsk output seems to indicate the drive only had minor inconsistencies and problems with security descriptors. It doesn't say anything about data errors. Is it possible that I still lost data on the drive?

 

[mwroobel]

Well, it sounds like either "optimize for quick removal" is not selected in the drive properties tab, or that some program is keeping files open on the drive. Hibernating and then removing is NOT what you want to do. To see what program is holding open the drive, you can use unlocker (http://www.emptyloop.com/unlocker/) or something like it from that list.