Scandisk goes loopy!

[Daveyboy]

When scanning my hard drive using the standard scan. Scandisk continuously loops, starts to verify FAT's and then folders, then FAT's and then Folders again. It never seems to complete either one. I have no other applications open (knowingly). Defrag also loops??

All my applications still run ok but also seem slower lately due to this prob.


Thanks for any assistance.

Dave'o.

[canit]

Put windows in safe mode, then try it.

[NDC]

The most prabable reason for that is there may be programs running in the background such as Anti-Virus program, or data exchanges from cable or DSL modem, etc. I've had the same problem running scandisk or defrag. Try disabling the virus program in the taskbar or try waht CANDIT said and that should solve the problem. http://sysopt.earthweb.com/forum/smile.gif

[2canSAM]

AOL AIM ir icq can also be a culprit. What I do is press ctrl-alt-del and make sure to close out everything but systray and explorer. Also disable your screen saver if you use one.

[jmatt]

http://www.geocities.com/thegorx/Windows/Help/Scandisk.htm

[Axel]

All good suggestions at this point - allow me to try to summarize -

definitely boot into safe mode -

get into your screen-saver settings and turn them off - write a post-it note to turn that back on later -

do a <ctrl> - <alt> - <del> to pull up your task manager - the only thing you need running is <explorer> - which is the windows 9x operating system - anything else there (including systray) - end task on it until it is definitely gone - some things take 4 or even 5 attempts to actually make them go away. Most things won't load in safe mode - but some still do.

then start your scandisk -

let it restart as many times as it needs to to complete all the way through -

In my experience - the absolute worst one I've seen on a system that didn't have a virus on it took 16 hours to complete. That computer hadn't been defragged in over a year - was running win95 - and had had a LOT of web development work done on it. It was running a 200mHz processor and had a 6GB hard drive on it.

We let it complete, but did eventually have to rebuild and reload the system.

Scandisk can fix some things - but this was asking it to do the impossible.... Re-writing that much of the hard drive fixing things apparently scrambled enough of the OS to give us lasting problems -

So - if you still have problems - lets do the following -

1) update virus definition files and sweep the system - might not be a Scandisk problem.

2)
If it isn't a virus - make sure you've "uninstalled" all the programs you no longer run on a regular basis. Do this through the control panel add/remove programs applet. After uninstalling everything you don't need anymore - download and install a copy of MSRegclean - you can find that on the microsoft support site. Several cheap software installs don't completely remove stuff they write into your registry when they uninstall - MSRegclean does a tolerably good job cleaning up the mess. A technical note here - deleting is NOT the same as uninstalling. Simply deleting program files in windows explorer doesn't alter the registry and can leave executible messages in place within the registry looking for files that are no longer there on the hard disk resulting in crashes.

Some people will then also execute the "sysedit" command off of start > run and look in the win.ini and system.ini files for "residue" - it's also a good idea to check the autoexec.bat and config.sys file while in here. You tend to trip across all sorts of interesting dross that can be cleaned out when doing this manually. rule of thumb here - if you aren't sure - don't touch it - and don't forget to save.

Between a possible virus and a messy registry, that would probably answer your slow start-up problem......

After completeing a scandisk - then delete all *.tmp files - clean out the temporary internet folder - clean out the netscape cache folder if you have one - delete / uninstall everything you no longer want - THEN do a defrag. - let it complete too.

Should all that fail - our esteemed ultimate member BBA occassionally re-posts his - "how to rebuild a win95 install without reloading" post on this site - search for it if you want to go through it.

Should that not work - time to do a low level format on the hard drives and reinstall. I know some people who do this 4 or 5 times a year because they do so much on their systems. I'm not a fan of that, but have done it 2 times in the last 18 months for one reason or another.