Win98SE Surface Scan

[sciport]

Win98SE,ASUS P2BF BX board,WD 13mb HDD, 128mb
SDram.
Sometimes when re-booting after a normal shutdown Win98 wants to do a surface scan,
saying that Windows was not shut down properly and there may be errors on the hdd.
Of course with a 13gb drive it takes a while.
It doesn't always happen, but I cant figure out why.
Anyone have any ideas?
Much appreciated Thanks.

[Axel]

In my experience, I'd say there might be 4 things going on -

1) - whatever you used to partition the drive didn't do a good job and you need to try another tool
2) - you have a damaged drive and need to exchange it
3) - you have a boot sector virus trashing your hard drive and you'd be better off Fdisking it and starting over
4) - you partitioned using the WD EZ tool and then tried to use norton speed-disk or some such program on it and those two programs typically do not play well together.

The first thing I would do is reboot into safe mode and to a scandisk at the Thorough level without automatically fixing errors and see what it turns up. - could be a bad drive with damage in the boot sector.

Once the scandisk finishes, attempt to let it repair anything it finds, then do a defrag while still in safe mode.

Regardless of whether or not that turns anything up, update you virus definitions and do a scan of all of your hard drives to see if it uncovers a virus on your system.

If you did use the WD EZ tool to partition your drive, this board has found that tool causes several problems and should be avoided - someone here might be able to point you to the UN-EZ instructions and suggest a better tool to set up your drive.

There's a place to start. - if any of this is confusing or you get stuck, don't hesitate to ask here or e-mail any of us directly with your questions.

Let us know what you find.

[This message has been edited by Axel (edited 01-06-2000).]

[sciport]

Again thanks for your prompt reply Axel,
Per your post, the background on the HDD
is as follows.
I re-installed W98SE about 3 months ago, prior to doing so I zeroed out the drive using WD's Dlgdiag.exe utility, used my win98
startup floppy to fdisk it for one partition Fat32. I formatted with the /s switch and proceeded with the W98SE install.
I use Norton AV 5.0 and update the signatures
usually weekly followed by a reboot and scan of all files. I realize that this is no guarantee of getting a virus, but I am usuall y pretty current.
Per your reply I re-booted into safe mode and
did a thorough scandisk with no auto fix.
Scandisk complained about re-starting 10 times, at this point I did control alt delete
, the only things running were explorer, my computer, scandisk, as far as I could see.
Scandisk complained once more about re-starting 10 times, but then continued on
without re-starting to the end. There were no errors. I de-fragged while still in safe mode. I then re-booted with the W98 boot disk and ran Dlgdiag.exe it came out ok as well.
This was 4 days ago I believe and so far there hasn't been a re-occurence.
The restarting of the scandisk might be related to the w98 scheduler, but I don't know if it runs in safe mode.
Best regards.
Sciport