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Disk Cleanup Scheduled Task hangs

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9 replies

by ksearch Jan 2, 2003 last reply Jan 8, 2003

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I have a user with Windows 2000 pro. They have disk cleanup as a scheduled task, occuring on startup. The gray dialog box appears asking which drive to cleanup, hit ok, and then it says calculating. Lots of disk activity, task manager shows it taking anywhere from 60-80% of the cpu, but the blue bar never moves, and it remains in this state until I reboot.

Other times, disk cleanup will execute just fine. Start to finish in just a few minutes.

Any thoughts?

9 replies

by ann777 Jan 2, 2003

I'd suggest you run chkdsk /r the next time you reboot this system. You may have bad sectors on the hdd ; make sure event viewer does not report any hdd errors. The fact that this is intermittant points to a potential hardware failure.

by ksearch Jan 8, 2003

No hardware issues found. Very new laptop, and was hoping disk errors wouldn't be present, although the potential is always there. But the drive looks good. Thanks for your suggestion.

by ksearch Jan 2, 2003

good suggestion. I will run chkdsk for this user the next time they are a meeting. Thanks! I'll keep everyone posted.

by rmclarty Jan 2, 2003

I bet you have an Anti-Virus program initializing while the disk cleanup is trying to run. Anti-Virus programs are notorius for needing to start completely before disk utilities are run. ScanDisk sometimes will not run at all while McAfee is running. Try disabling Anti-Virus or running disk cleanup after complete boot up.

by ksearch Jan 8, 2003

I agree that it is connected to McAfee (the root of all evil on this user's pc). Unfortunately, automatic scheduling options are limited to startup, logon, or a specific time of day. Startup and logon do not allow McAfee to finish loading, and specific time of day is no good for this user. So, I put a shortcut on the desktop and told them to use that--just not first thing after booting up. Thanks for your help!

by ksearch Jan 3, 2003

Another good suggestion! yes, we do have antivirus software running. I will attempt to delay the cleanup--perhaps at shutdown rather than start up. Need to wait for user to be in meeting (user is company president).