Quoting Straight_Man

Um, are you BOOTING off of a USB removable drive???

MFT$ is a master file table. You can turn off delayed writes in XP, and that has fixed some things like that, but then you get to live with the system writing a lot of small chunks.

Which motherboard is doing this, please???? the other possibility is that you have a resource conflict with other things, so do you have USB mouse and printer and\or scanner, is the HD hooked to a hub (only root hubs, ie driect to computer are recommended for this, if you hook to a little hub that gives you multiple ports and you hook a HD up to that and the hub is busy, your HD gets write failures).

There was a USB compat fix for USB HDs and Burners in one of the Abit patches for the IC7-Max3, and I think I remember finding out there were other Abit boards that got BIOS patches for that also(IIRC, IC7 series got USB functionality patches in various flavors and BIOS update versions). If it is an Abit IC7-Max3 the new FlashMenu (v. 1.33) installs the new BIOS 14 fine.

Note that XP expects its boot drive to always be available, and expects HDs to be available on demand-- and unless you turn delayed write off, which would with a busy USB subsystem would cause Hd access issues, these write chunks could be large and random access in every sense of the word. Your HD could even have spun down if not externally powered with a transformer(delay due to spinup will cause XP to error out if it does not KNOW the drive is spun down, and sicne it did nto tell the drive to spin down, might be that also). By default, when you have a HD hooked up, XP tries to write when the system is less busy, up to a certain percentage of RAM and swap. If USB is busy when that delayed write happens, then you have set up exactly what you ar getting.

Without more info as to system and what else was happening, no better ideas to start things off with....

John D.