Keep getting this exception during a Video Mixdown (and render): Happens about 3/4 of the way through a 22 minute sequence

Exception: FINISH_WRITE_POS_GT_BYTES_WRITTEN, className: DIDwriter (the Media created to this point may be unusable and/or incomplete)

System Specs:

2.66 Dual Core Intel Xeon (Mac Pro), 10.5.3 OSX, Media Composer 3.0 software, 9GB (667 DDR-2) RAM, NVidia GeForce 7300 GT 256MB

 Sending the Video Mixdown (and all Media Creation) to a FireWire 400 Seagate drive (over 500+ GB hard drive space available)

*Need help immediately*

You're sure you have enough drive space to handle the mixdown?

Yes sir, the drive has 535GB of free space left for the Video Mixdown.

A couple of things come to mind here. Could be the mixdown is hitting corrupt media or it could be an effect that is either not rendered or corrupted.

Try mixing down smaller portions of the sequence to see if you can sleuth out the problem segment.

Looks as if it's screwing up at the same frame on an interview clip. The funny thing, though is that I brought all of the media/drives over to our PC Media Composer 2.5 system and the mixdown worked. But NOW we are having freezes when importing our Quicktime Reference file into Adobe Encore DVD 2.0

By the way: (on the PC system), I did a video mixdown and audio mixdown and combined the two into one sequence. Both mixdowns are located on the same external firewire drive. I can easily export my Quicktime Reference file to a location on my desktop. It's only when I import the QT Reference (as an asset) in Adobe Encore DVD 2.0 that I encounter a FREEZE and CRASH.

Any interruption in the data flow between the drives and the CPU can show up as a "Corruption" too so, possibly, just the physical act of unplugging and plugging the drive back in shook something loose. 

How are those drives formatted? Mac systems don't play well with PC drives anymore.

The drives are formatted as NTSF, but there is one other Firewire Drive (used in the project) that's FAT32. Would that cause the freeze of the QT Reference in Adobe Encore?

On a Mac..yes. 

As of the x.7.5 releases, the Macs started having trouble with PC formatted drives. Both NTFS and FAT - 32.

Also last time I looked, on a Mac, you can read from NTFS, but not write to them unless you have Paragon software.

That makes sense for the Mac, but I transferrred the media files and project file over From our Mac Pro to our PC station (HP 8000) Avid MC. It Mixed Down and Exported fine; but there's now a Freeze upon Import in Adobe Encore DVD. I saw BLKDOG's posts recently, and I came up with the idea to MIXDOWN to a different drive to see if that worked. Exported the QT reference, imported into Adobe and (crossing my fingers) seems to work as of this post. I'll keep you updated.

*But the main issue: What does that exception 'FINISH_WRITE_POS...' mean?

It means there was an interruption to the data being written to the drive.

Because your QT ref is pointing to Media on that drive, I'm beginning to wonder if it's not a problem with the drive itself.

BLKDOG, I successfully burned my project to DVD in Adobe Encore DVD. I needed to re-route my Video Mixdown to one of my other FireWire 400 drives (other than the 'faulty' drive which originally gave me BOTH the error message on the MAC PRO and the FREEZE in the Adobe Encore DVD program). Though I'm not 100% sure, I believe it is indeed the 'Faulty' FireWire drive which has caused all of these problems.

Anyway, thank you for constantly updating me with new info throughout this afternoon. It helped me complete an urgent project on DVD to a client.

Before you go too far on the FW drive, try a new power supply.  I've found power supplys to cause this type of error multiple times recently both in my own shop and with other users on these forums.