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BSOD-Win98-During defrag-WHY?

S

superkdogg

Senior member
I have a machine that I'm working on for my neighbor. It occasionally will BSOD for no reason during defrag, and has also made some pretty loud sounds (grinding?) and frozen up-also during defrag. I have not been able to make it fail any other way.

I need to fix it for her, and I have not come to a firm decision on what is wrong. The sounds that it makes make me lean toward hard drive, but what do you all think?

Please respond ASAP if you know-I'm supposed to get it back to her soon.

Thanks!
 
I am with DaFinn.. I don't even help people with 98 anymore... such worthless garbage.

If you really want to defrag the PC, download a defragging program, the one built into 98 is literally completely useless.

diskeeper should work.
 
Yes, de-fragging with windows 98, rarely worked, however since you heard the hard drive making loud grinding sounds, it is possible it may be going bad. Of course it could also just be an older loud drive. Were you doing the defrag in safe mode? With win98 I always had to do the defrag in safe mode, otherwise it would just keep restarting itself.
 
Originally posted by: stevty2889
Yes, de-fragging with windows 98, rarely worked, however since you heard the hard drive making loud grinding sounds, it is possible it may be going bad. Of course it could also just be an older loud drive. Were you doing the defrag in safe mode? With win98 I always had to do the defrag in safe mode, otherwise it would just keep restarting itself.
Click to expand...

It's because running processes infringe on the defrag program for some reason... usually if you close ALL running tasks while booted into 98 (not safe mode) the defrag would run (In my experience) but IMO that makes it useless because what average person knows to do that? Windows NT (2k,xp) have no problem defragging regardless of what is running on the PC... :thumbsup:
 
1) Find out the make of the HD and go to the manufacturer's site and d/l their HD test utility to see if the HD is going bad.

2) Hit ctrl-alt-delete and close down verything but systray and explorer, then defrag. basically shut down all other processes.

Fern
 
Just FFR, it definitely WAS hardware in this case. Right after I copied all the important stuff to another HDD I threw in there, it started making a clunking sound that I can only describe as sounding like the motor was disengaging or shutting off. Sometimes it would start again in a few seconds, others it would do this repeatedly and make a grinding noise. Regardless the BSOD and even the dreaded cannot write to hdd-data may be lost (paraphrase) came up. This time it wasn't Win98, although I do agree that it is a crummy OS. However, I doubt it would do me much good to convince this old couple to spend another $100 to get XP on their 5+ yr. old Compaq with a P3 600.
 
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