WinME Scandisk VERY annoying

[RalphTheCow]

It looks like one of the improvements in WinME is that the progress bar is no longer a progress bar, so you have absolutely no idea how long a scandisk will take. Windows 3.1 used to say: A surface scan will take X minutes - do you wish to perform one now? And then there would be a decent graphical representation of the process. On WinME, no estimate is given, and the bar just jumps around aimlessly. Progress.

A scandisk with surface scan has been running for 2-3 hours on an almost new 40 gig harddrive with only about 4 gig of data on it, in a PIII 866 system. Defrag told me I needed to do a surface scan, which is scary enough. Now, I don't know if this process is in the weeds or not. Does anybody know how long this should take? Does this sound normal?

 

[Fardringle]

Scandisk with a surface scan on my 8.4GB drive with about 5.5GB of data in WindowsME takes about 30-40 minutes (surface scans can take a while since it is physically testing every sector on the drive), and the progress bar does actually show steady progress-no jumping around at all. It's odd that yours would act differently, unless there is actually something wrong with the drive...

 

[RalphTheCow]

The bar is going through a cycle of Checking Folders... where it returns to 0 and goes up to 25% or so, then it does seem to return to the same place for surface scan, so far 229,000 clusters out of 1,200,000, but the bar is about 60%?. It doesn't seem right, but I'll let it go all night and see how it looks in the morning.

 

[Marqui]

That is about right for scandisk. I do not use it much and don't find a need to use it unless serious corruption has occurred. Otherwise, if you want you can always disable scandisk at startup. I am not sure how it is done in WinMe,but it may be the same as Win98.


For Windows 98: run MSCONFIG, then goto advanced, then 4 from the bottom should be something labled like "Disable ScanDisk after Bad Shutdown".


For Windows 95:
Use the view menu to unhide the MSDOS.SYS file in the root directory and then right click the file and choose properties and uncheck the read only box. Then open the file in notepad and change "autoscan=1" to "autoscan=0" then recheck the read only box and re-hide system files in the view menu.

 

[RalphTheCow]

I found the problem. So I should amend my complaint about WinME to read: The scandisk error message "Windows or some other program has written to the disc causing scandisk to restart 10 times. Do you want to continue to display this message?" gives no indication how to fix the problem, it just allows you to cancel the message allowing scandisk to run forever while restarting itself.

I originally removed everything from the system tray, and most of the startup folder, but I did leave a few things in it. After getting the same message on a Win98 laptop, I did the CNTRL-ALT-DEL and removed all programs except systray and explorer, and this did the trick. Scandisk surface scan then took a reasonable 45 minutes on the laptop 4.3 gig, and 90 on the desktop 40 gig. I don't know how else to get rid of all those programs or what they are, but I can't believe this is the design of Windows. Nowhere in the Windows help file for scandisk or even the MS Knowledge Base did I find any mention of this. I really find it hard to believe that Win98 and WinME are supposed to be more logical than Win3.1.