Scandisk stops, even while in DOS

I have a friend that has a Windows 98 computer and it has not been defraged lately so I was asked to defrag her computer. Well I know some about computers so before I did this I turned off the screensaver, booted in safe mode, and ended all necessary background applications. I unhooked the cable modem too because someone once said that could cause problems. Defrag got over half of the way done and it gave me this error message that said DEFRAG005 so I looked this up on microsoft knowlegde base and it said to fix this I had to do a thorough scan with scandisk. Ok so I am faced with new challenges now. Back to safe mode I go and I choze to do a thorough scan. Well it didnt even get half way done and it froze up. No error message this time. It just froze and I had to restart the computer. Yes I attempted this when I wasnt in safe mode once too. Also I tried shutting down and entering DOS mode and doing a thorough scan. It froze at 21% all times I tried this. I tried CHKDSK because somebody told me I should do this and it didnt work. I also deleted all temp files and ran disk cleanup both. Any other ideas?

 

When Scandisk "froze", how did you determine this?

I presume there was no movement in the blocks on the display?
Was there still "noise" (chatter) from the disk drive?
Was the disk light still flashing?

If so, scandisk could be now fixing the bad sector(s) that is has found, and depending on how many are involved, the cluster size and the number of files living in those clusters, this could take some time.

 

There was no noise from the hard drive and the light was not flashing or flickering either. This was in DOS so i know nothing was trying to run in the background. It froze at 21% and when it was checking the clusters the numbers just stayed the same. For example one minute it was at like 3764/38654 when it was checking (i dont know the exact number so i may be far off) and the number kept going up until the progress got to 21% and that number didnt go any higher. This was when there was no hard drive activity noticable. Thanks again

 

Mino-I used to have this problem until I started using EndItAll which was recommended in this forum
http://home.ptd.net/~don5408/toolbox/enditall/

Good Luck!

 

Would suggest running System File Checker on the Windows 98 machine. You could have a corrupt file that is causing havoc with the Scandisk program. Make sure you have the cds to restore any corrupted or missing files that are located. Just a suggestion, and if/when this is done, then perhaps trying Scandisk again. I was wondering if the "automatically fix errors" box was also ckd, as it should be?

Good Luck !

 

Make sure if you use this program to use the "close all" feature NOT the "kill all" feature!!

 

Since mino is running in DOS, EndItAll is not going to run (since it is a windows app), and there are not any other apps running to begin with.

Do not run Scandisk with the AutoFix option set. If it is selected UNselect it. This site does an excellent job of explaining why this is a "potentially" dangerous choice.

mino:
I can't explain the scandisk freeze. How long did you leave it running after it froze. (and how large is the disk you are running this on?)
Bad Sector recovery can be a painfully long process, depending on the number involved. Let it sit for a while and see if any more progress occurs.

You can also try running SFC and using it to reload the SCANDISK.exe program from the windows CD. I would have expected a corrupted program to fail as opposed to hang, but ....

And, in SFC do NOT arbitrarily reload any files that it "says" are corrupt or missing. If you do not run SFC regularly, it can produce misleading information. As well, it does report files as being corrupted, when in fact, they are not.