I have a 4-year-old Micron PC (200 MHz, 64 MB RAM, Win 98 2ed) that has begun to flake out - the response time has slowed enormously, and it is constantly trying to run ScanDisk. McAfee tells me there are no viruses present. So I thought I’d fire up Norton Utilities (from the CD drive) to see what was wrong. However, the physical scan of the hard drive gets only about 40% through before it too slows down enormously - I finally stopped the scan after it had been running for 5.5 hours, with most of that time spent scanning just a a few hundred KB! Any suggestions about what might be wrong, or how I might fix things? Thanks in advance.
Not an answer, but a suggestion. Why not let Norton run overnight, and see if it gets further? I had to do that with mine, and finally something gave, and it finished defragging the bloody thing. Worked better after that. Of course, someone with real knowledge will probably come along and tell you what’s really happening.
looks like you need to defrag more. it will take longer if your files are scattered throughout your harddrive, rather than being optimized by defragging. i would recommend to do this at least once every two weeks, overnight if it takes a long time. scan disk is important too, you should definately start with that cause it sounds like it hasn’t been done in quite a long time. your processor is pretty slow too, so that contributes to the problem. but doing the process overnight is great advice.
You also might want to boot up (I’m assuming Windows 95 or 98) in safe mode. This will bypass all programs in your start-menu and in the RUN section of the Windows Registry. This can help you avoid the irritating message “drive contents have changed, restarting scan.”
The best (fastest) way to run scandisk is in DOS. This page explains it: http://www.pcdon.com/page82.html Look for part “(B) DOS”. Based on your computer’s specs and my assumption that your drive is 10G or less, it should take less than an hour. Regardless of the size, it will be much less time than what it would have been under Windows. Also, Micron may have a special utility on their site.
-Rob
You might search for ‘scandisk’ here as it’s been written about a lot. I’d say run Windows scandisk under DOS, all night if necessary, like the person said above.
Also, uncheck ‘through’ which makes it take much much longer.
Some chipset and drive combos are simply amazingly slow (older IBM Aptiva’s and Compaq Presarios come to mind)in defrag or scandisk mode. Standard access is OK but defrag and scandisk bog like crazy.
Sometimes extended SD tmes are also indicative of a failing drive and the system is have a hard time reliably reading the media surface. Huge new multi-gig Drives are very cheap. Your symptoms sound like a slowly failing drive. Given possible incipient drive problems and slow access I would suggest you replace yours sooner not later especially if your data is valuable.
It sounds like you have some bad sectors on your hard drive. The drive wastes a lot of time reading and re-reading bad sectors trying to get enough good bits to use error correction to deduce what the data originally was. There are two consequences to having bad sectors:
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Ordinary file work takes a longer than it did before. (When the disk was good and only 1 read was needed.)
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Scandisk (and defrag) programs will stall out when they reach the bad area of the disk as it slows down to read and re-read many bad sectors in a row.
Sound familiar?
The only solution is to get a new hard drive. You probably will not be able to copy all your files off the bad drive (and they may not be trustworthy anyway.)
I repeat, this is the only solution. And ignoring it will only make things worse. Think of it as cancer of the hard drive. Remove the diseased organ ASAP.
If you run the defrag (skipping the scan) and scroll down through the whole drive (showing “details”), you can see all the physicaly bad sectors, if any. This will give you an idea of the shape of your hard drive.
Thank you, everyone, for all the responses. I let Scandisk run overnight; it finally did finish, and yes, there are a bunch of bad sectors on the drive. Bad news if this drive is slowly failing, as ftg and astro suggest - it’ll be the second time I’ve had to replace the hard drive on this machine, and I don’t relish doing it again. 
But the machine is perfectly fine otherwise for the word processing & other basic office tasks that it’s used for, so I guess I’ll just bite the bullet.
Thanks again.
Most OEM drive warranties are 3 years. If this is your 2nd replacement in 4 years you may be able to get it replaced free. I would still suggest a new drive if this is feasible. Try calling the drive company directly, not Micron.
astro, I hadn’t thought about giving Western Digital a call directly. But since the current drive is just 3 GB, and there are lots of new drives that are much bigger and pretty cheap, I’ll probably forego warranty issues & buy a new drive anyway.
On the old computers you can run instead: chkdsk/f
It’s mighty fast too.