Problems using scandisk on Hard Drive

[Milito01]

Now, i know that there are some problems with this hard drive, possible surface damage, but whenever I run scandisk to try an diagnose these problems in windows or try to get other problems worked out, it staps and tells me: "Scandisk has restarted 10 times because another app is writing to the disk" So, it never completes. But, i only have scandisk open, all other progs closed. Whats the problem? Can anyone school me on this, and get scandisk to work?

 

[aventari]

Have you ctrl-alt-del'd to make sure all the other porgrams are closed? sometimes a background program can write to the disk as well.

All you should have running is explorer and maybe systray

GL!

 

[Milito01]

Thanks for the reply, i appreciate it. And yes, all other programs are closed, except explorer and systray. I dont know what could be writing, but i suspect hard drive problems as the culprit.

 

[Hyperchronismos]

If you are confident of yourself, do something more radical (I am doing this all time with both scandisk and defrag):

Edit your system.ini (C:\Windows\System.ini).Under [boot] there is an option shell=explorer.exe.If you ever used any shell replacement (like Litestep) you may know this option, it defines the GUI.Change this to shell=scandisk.exe (or defrag.exe if you want to defragment your drive).Then reboot and scandisk will run before anything else (in fact it will be the only program running not even explorer will be running).When everything finishes reboot (hard reboot) and press F8 and choose command prompt only, to boot into MSDOS.Edit system.ini again (edit system.ini) and change again to shell=explorer.exe.Press Alt+F+X and then yes to save and exit and then give win to boot Windows.

But as I said do this only if you 100% understood it.It works for me all the time.

 

[Nih]

I would disable auto insertion notification for you cdroms. Also i think scandisk has problems(in win) with active partitions over 8 gig.

 

[sciencewhiz]

Try running scandisk in safe mode

 

[GregMal]

The 1st thing I'd do is goto the web site of the harddrive manufacturer. Almost all of them have a harddrive utility to diagnose problems. The software will "block off" the bad sectors so no writing/reading will occur. Then I'd reboot to safe mode and scandisk from there.....Greg