Okay, so Scandisc doesn't work...

Factual Questions
1

Okay…I tried running scandisc on the ol’ computer to make sure that everything’s running okely-dokely. But it just keeps restarting over and over. I’ve even let it run all night, but it hadn’t made any progress. So obviously, there’s a problem somewhere. But, since scandisc isn’t working, I can’t fix it. Which also means that I can’t defrag the thing, which means that, among other things, the ol’ computer’s moving slower than I’d like it to.

Is there anything I can do, short of reformatting the hard drive, that will tell me where the error lies? Any thing I can download, preferreably free?

Any Doper halp is appreciated!

2

When I do it, I use CTRL-ALT-DEL to shut down everything but Explorer. That way, nothing will write to disk while it’s scanning or defragging.

Once I learned that trick I never had a problem.

3

You don’t mention what OS you are using (which is very helpful to know). So one guess is to boot in Safe Mode and then run ScanDisk.

(“ScanDisc” would be for CDs!)

4

Yep.knowing what O/S you’re running would help.

Have you tried running from safemode?

5

Ahhhh poop! Sorry about that ftg… I didn’t see your reply.

6

Ah scandisk again.

Try booting the computer with the startup disk then you can run scandisk properly. Windoz makes a startup disk & thenyou put that in the floppy drive & restart the computer, hopefully, that boots to A: then you can run scandisk & then defrag from that floppy disk.

7

Yeah, I guess I should have mentioned the OS. I’m running Windows 98 on this thing.

I haven’t tried safemode, as Airman’s suggestion worked.

8

Some background process is writing to the disk at periodic intervals (nothing wrong with that, but it will cause scandisk to restart).

Just turn off all background processes in the startup menu, reboot, then run scandisk. You shouldn’t need to use safe mode – I do this all the time.

For '98:

Run->msconfig->startup, uncheck everything, OK, reboot.

When you are done, re-enable whatever you disabled, so it might be good to take notes first.