Aces High Bulletin Board
General Forums => Hardware and Software => Topic started by: Ripsnort on September 06, 2002, 09:59:59 AM
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Recently, with a WinME OS system, I was loading some software for my Son's computer, and the hard drive became dangerously full, so we aborted the load. We deleted all sorts of unnecessary files and old programs. Then we ran Defrag (Yes, I know I should run scandisk first) and Defrag said it could not finish due to an error, and that I should first run scandisk to fix the error).
So I ran scandisk. And waited....and waited...endless loop. Cold boot, ran it over night, still at 0% complete.
Any clues as to why we cannot run scandisk?
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nope
but I'd copy what if anything ain't replaceable - format C and start fresh if the drive is that chocked full of "stuff"
probably seem like an upgrade with the boost in speed after clearing out the crud :)
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Not so long ago you could run defrag and scandisk in pure DOS-mode IIRC.
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Make sure all programs are closed that would want to write to disk.
If something writes to disk in Win 9x defrag/scandisk has to start over.
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If you have a friend with Norton Utilities, ask to borrow the Emergency Disk floppies that came with it. You can put the floppy in, reboot, and run NDD from DOS. This will bypass any issues with files being open or programs moving data.
If the friend does not have floppies, use their install CD. It should be bootable and has NDD.
Finally, if it is an option, consider installing Windows 98 SE instead of Millenium. Your sons computer will be more stable, will be able to run more games, and will be faster.
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My laptop has 98SE and I use CNTRL/ALT/DEL to close everything except Explorer and Systray before I run Scandisk/Defrag.
DJ229
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Yeah, all background apps are closed..tried that, someone over on AGW suggested to try to run it in safe mode, which I will try.
Eagle, Sat I will finally have a CD burner, I just may do a format after saving my stuff...
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Just closing all programs doesn't always fix the problem. When I worked in tech support for Symantec many years ago, we encountered this frequently. One solution we found for when closing all the programs wasn't enough to prevent getting NDD restarts was to set the swap file from dynamic to static. Eg, instead of being a dynamic swap file that resizes itself as needed, set it to be minimum size of 512megs and max size of 512 megs.
FYI.
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Follow up:
Scan/defrag in safe mode did the trick. Thanks all to the replies!
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Ripsnort, does that computer have MS Office on it by chance? Fastfind will cause that if it's not disabled.
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Run scan disk in safe mode it should get the job done then.
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What if you can't run it in Safe Mode without getting interruptions?
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Originally posted by bloom25
Ripsnort, does that computer have MS Office on it by chance? Fastfind will cause that if it's not disabled.
I disabled it first thing along time ago Bloom.
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Originally posted by Toad
What if you can't run it in Safe Mode without getting interruptions?
C:\Windows\Command\Scandisk.exe
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Yeah, booted into DOS mode and ran it and it zipped right through and said everything was fine.
Then I tried to defrag and windoze and it said the drive had errors that Scandisk needed to fix.
Not sure what's going on, but getting real close to burning a CD with the important stuff and formatting the drive. Been a while since I did.