Message #703736 and a similar one by John Jones in the OS forum prompted me to re-try setting the "Disable write cache" on my Win2K system. You may remember that it could be done in prior versions of Win2K BUT that it was reset between boots.

Since I installed SP3 on the box some time ago, re-trying seemed worth a go. So I went to ControlPanel-->System-->Hardware-->DeviceManager and in the "Devices by Type" view I clicked the "+" beside the "Disk drives" item to expose my (single on this machine) drive. I then d-clicked on the drive name and clicked the "Disk Properties" tab of the displayed dialogue. The single entry on the page was "write cache enabled" and it was checked to be ON. I UNchecked it and OKed my way back out.

A re-boot after a shutdown revealed that the setting remained UNchecked, which is different than what it used to do (always came back as checked).

So I conclude that SP3 probably fixed this old problem.

Can someone else try this to confirm that it IS fixed? Thanks