What's the longest time before Windows flushes data to disk?

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Simple question, really. We all know (or at least I think I know) that, if
the machine is idle, Windows flushes any data written to disk within about 2
seconds. But what if the machine is very busy, say because it is booting. In
practice what would be the longest time before data created by an
application running at normal priority gets written to disk? Might it be in
the cache for 1 minute or longer before that happens?

The machine in question belongs to a customer and is running NT/2000/2003
server, I forget which exactly. Our application is running as a service and
reads data from the serial port, which it logs to disk. The machine was
booted, but power lost fairly quickly, possibly before booting was complete.
Data has been lost and I'm trying to explain it. There is no trace of some
data that appears to have come in on the serial port and should have been
logged during that time.


.

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