Scandisk = Not workie

[Spindler]

hi, i am posting here in a desperate attempt to try and gain a resolution to my scandisk situation.

Problem : unable to scandisk my D:\ and E:\ drives.

Whenever I run scandisk on D: or E: drives it comes up with a msg saying "Unable to continue due to not enough memory available" C:\ drive has about 200 megs free out of a partition that has 2.0 gigs, and D: and E: are both 17.2 gigs.

Solutions Tried :
-upgrading from 64 Ram to 128 Ram. No fix.
-changing drive space used by windows virtual memory to F:\ which has 3.0 gigs free. No fix.

Any ideas why it does this? Btw, scandisk works fine on F:\ drive (14.0 gigs), which is actually the same drive as C:\ , just a different partition.

Please help me!! *much* thanks in advance for any help!

 

[GregMal]

Have you tried running scandisk from "safe" mode??
Sometimes that works.
My 2nd PC wouldn't run scandisk on the D: drive.
I installed Norton Utilities and the disk doctor ran fine.....
Greg

 

[Jonny]

I have heard of this error, its a known windows bug. I will see if I can get more information for you. Iam pretty sure this is a fixable problem.

Feel free to look at MS site for info on it too.

BTW, I know about this since I stumble accross it 2 or 3 days ago looking for help on something else. I thought to myself, "what, I have never seen that"

 

[Jonny]

hmmmm...this probley isn't it is it? What OS are you using?

Attempt #1

 

[Jonny]

Hmmm...do you have a western digital drive? What hard drive you have?

Attempt #2

 

[Lunchboxah]

scandisk /autofix /surface from cold boot dos prompt

You can use a 98/ME startup disk if you want

 

[custer]

The last time I had this problem, scandisk wouldn't run at all after a power outtage/shutdown. I finally tracked it back to Norton Utilities being on the machine, then uninstalled. It took low level control of the machine, but the uninstall left it that way, so I was left with a zero-byte-length [Norton] scandisk.alt file and a message on the screen stating, "something is preventing scandisk from running." Finally I got a copy of Win98's scandisk.exe file and renamed it scandisk.alt. It kinda sucks that Norton code is still somewhere on the puter, but at least scandisk works now.

 

[Spindler]

Thanks for all your helpful replies and suggestions. Here are the results of what I've tried.

From Gregmal - "try scandisk in safemode"
result - same problem still arises.

From Johnny - Answers to your questions:
OS is Win98 4.10.1998
and all hardrives are Maxtor
reply - I looked at those articles you posted and it seems
like it IS a bug.... more on that below.

From lunchboxah - "try scandisk from a cold boot dos prompt"
result - works perfectly on every drive! too bad win98 doesnt
recognize this and still shows that you havent scanned
this drive in "568 days" lol

From custer , result - I tried installing norton2k on my system...

 

[Spindler]

oops, accidentally clicked "reply" button before finishing writing my post. heh.

like i was saying, i was unabl to even install norton2k so i dont know how it'd work out. it kept freezing up on the uninstall portion of the install process.

here's some more other stuff i tried so far ...i swapped the original
d:\ (17.2 gig) drive to a 8.2 gig drive and guess what? it scandisk'ed
the smaller drive without any problems. both drives have alot of files in them, but obviously, the larger drive has more files, so the article that jonny linked to seems to be right. there might be a limit to number of files on a drive before it can no longer be scandisked.

on a side note, to prove this theory out, i'm going to hook up an empty
20 gig drive and see if that can be scann'ed or not. will post w/ results... if anyone else has any other suggestions, much appreciated! as it looks like, guess i'll be having to do the scandisking in dos prompts.