"drives locked" message

[Harry]

Trying to defrag a drive and getting a "drives locked" which halts defrag. What would cause that message? Thanks for the help..

[psyklone]

you may have a screwy install of defrag. the program runs a quick batch that locks the drive because defrag actually needs to lock your drive to allow it direct disk access ... access to interrupts 25 and 26, then when it is finished running then the batch unlocks the drive. what you may try to do is boot to a DOS prompt and type UNLOCK X where X is your hard drive letter designation. do this for any hard drives attached to your system. another thing that may be happening is if you have any other disk utility program that is running in the background, that may have previously locked your drive, before defrag was able to. i would boot up and kill all of your TSR programs before you run defrag.
let me know if you have any luck!

[richamies]

I seem to remember something about this back in the early days of Win95 release A, and i think it will still apply to all later releases.

Windows locks the drive from direct acces so applications need windows/dos 7's authority to do any changes to the drive, im not sure why defrag would need it, but if you try lock /? it will give you all the answers you need, i hope.....

[Harry]

Thanks. I'll try both suggestions!!

[BBA]

I'm thinking a virus.

Sounds like soimething I saw once. Where are you at with it now?

[Banti]

Do you have any other drive apps running? I rememeber that once Norton Speed Disk crashed, I had to reboot, beacuse the Drive was locked and norton was dead. The sugeestions above might have helped me, but that was a long time and many formats ago....


Banti