Okay, my computer is going wanky. I’ve figured out that every time it tries to defrag the hard drive, it locks up like a vault. I have to switch off the power to reboot. I have it set for automaintenance, with scheduled times, but have found that every time I come home it’s stuck and the screen won’t even restart (I think powersave kicks in but won’t recycle the screen).
What’s wrong? What do I do about it? How do I fix it?
Yes. I forgot to mention how I diagnosed the problem. I tried to run defrag manually, and it locked up at 0%, right off the bat, before the powersave kicked in. The powersave just explains the blank screen, not the lockup.
The techies who are on their way over (they had to stop off at Best Buy for something) will want to know what kind of computer you have, and what kind of software you’re using, and whether you’ve got Crunchy or Smooshy Chee-tohs.
Typically defrag lockups are often indicative of deeper and more serious disk (often corrupted media) problems.
1: First and foremost - BACKUP UP NOW!
2: Run scandisk and have it check the hard drive surface as well at the end of the normal scandisk file checks (it will offer you the option). You might also want to consider a more comprehensive disk utility suite like nortons.
3: Try defragging in real mode (non-windows) DOS. If all goes well in that mode it is likely a munged windows driver or a related issue. If it locks up in DOS you may have media corruption issues to deal with.
As Astro said BACKUP NOW. There may be no serious problem here but then again there could be. Be on the safe side.
Delete all unecessary files. No need to go too nuts but empty your TEMP folder, Recycle Bin, download folder and any other extraneous crap you don’t need anymore.
If you can scan for viruses (make sure you have the latest virus definition files).
Disable power management settings (no power management).
Disable screensaver.
Pause your Task Scheduler (right-click on icon in system tray).
Hit CTRL-ALT-DEL and End Task any item you see in the window except for Explorer and Systray.
Run Scandisk (thorough option). This can take awhile…go have lunch.
Run Defragmenter.
If successful great! If not…(actually this is good to do anyway)
Go to http://windowsupdate.microsoft.com and click on Product Updates. Start downloading anything that looks important. This may only work for Windows 98…not 95 (although I’m not sure…you do need a fairly recent version of Internet Explorer).
If all of this fails and problem continues a rebuild of your system may be in order.
Good luck! Let us know how it goes.
If you don’t have a CD-Burner or a ZIP drive or tape backup then you’re outta luck and stuck with the floppies. If floppies are what you have to deal with then here’s my suggestion:
Gather everything you want to save into one folder and use WINZIP (available at http://www.winzip.com ) to compress the whole lot into one file. When you tell WINZIP (not to be confused with Zip drives) to save the file it is zipping to a floppy drive it will automatically span disks. That is to say, as it runs out of room on one disk it will ask for the next and so on till it’s done. This is MUCH easier than saving miscellaneous files to multiple disks and saves on your total number of disks to be used. However, if you lose even one disk of the set (or it gets damaged) the whole lot is ruined so be careful with them.
Text files compress wonderfully, graphic files somewhat to not at all and MP3 files will not compress at all (they are already compressed and may actually increase in size if Winzipped). Hopefully you don’t have more than 10-20MB to save. If you do seriously consider the purchase of a CD-Burner (I wouldn’t bother with a Iomega Zip drive at this point).
Ideally Ghost or Drivecopy and another hard drive will do it.
You can copy your bookmarks and my documents to floppies; just back up your data and plan on reinstalling your apps.
carnivorousplant gave me an idea. If your harddrive is partitioned into more than one partition you can save your files to the second partition (if you have more than one drive letter for your harddrive [NOT CD drive] then you have more than one partition – i.e. C: and D: are your harddisk and E: is your CD-ROM).
Simply copy your files to the D: drive and work on the C: drive. Even if C: blows up and you have to rebuild your files are safe and sound on D:. Once the C: drive is taken care of copy back to C: and work on D:.
I’m not an expert but I had a similar problem once. Soon after installing a cable modem (on a win98 machine) defrag started to give me troubles. Defrag would repeatedly restart itself, after a few minutes or sometimes seconds. It seems possible to me that an analogous problem is occuring for you, and that is the reason defrag can’t get above zero % and eventually crashes the computer. I power down, unplug the cable modem, power up and defrag works fine for me. I don’t know if this has any bearing on your problem, though…
Irishman, most of these people must not be techs cause they don’t know what type of computer you have.
You really need to tell us. You know do you have W98? It could still be a Mac from all I read. Probably not…
If you have a PC, The computer is probably alright. You should of run scandisk first not defrag. Scandisk can get your HD back to order & then you run defrag. You must run Scandisk first. Try running it from DOS, NOT FROM WINDOWS.
This defeats the whole purpose of backups, which is to protect against disk failures. If drives C and D are partitions on the same physical disk, both will fail at the same time. If C and D are two separate disks on your system, it’s much safer but still not ideal - power supply problems (including lightning), disk controller problems and viruses can wipe out both disks at the same time. If you value your data, invest in some type of removable disk drive, preferably something optical (CD-R, DVD-RAM, MO, etc.).
What handy meant was the DOS mode of Windows, which is different from pure MS-DOS. When you shut down Win98, one of the choices (among “reboot” and “shutdown”) is “restart as DOS” or something like that. Or when you boot up, press F8 soemwhere and it gives you a choice of starting as command line only (no GUI).
You definitely shouldn’t dig up your ancient MS-DOS 6.2 disks and run scandisk from there.