problems with scandisk

Your best bet is to restart in Safe Mode and then run scandisk.

Another option is to turn off your antivirus program and to disconnect your computer from any network connections, before starting scandisk.

Anything that your computer is running may cause scandisk to go into the "contents have changed... retry" loop.

It is kind of a utility program to really analyze your disk perfectly when other programs are running. Here is what I recommend. Run Scandisk.exe for MS-DOS. It effectively does the same thing. Or If you really need to use scandisk for windows, thenunload everything else. If you have to, press ALT+CTRL+DEL and click on end task for every application except Explorer (and systray if you want your mini icons). That way, no programs will interfere with the disk. and also try to make it so that your programs use less memory than what your system has.

You probably already did this, but check to see if you have a screen saver running, I found this out one time when I booted a computer to safe mode to run scan disk and discovered that a screen saver will run even in safe mode. Hope this helps.

Ryan

At least it finished! You did not give any system specs. 2 - out of the box with 60G hard drives never finished, manufacturer had a problem and the only way to fix was to fdisk and reload. This computer appears very happy with 3 - 20G partitions.

Try using F8 at your second screen and starting in MS DOS mode. once there then you should be able to scandisk fully without any interruptions from Windows. If this doesn't appear to work insert your Startup disk and boot to minimum install then C:\scandisk will normally do the job for you.
Windows can often have hidden TSR's that don't show in Ctrl+Alt+Del activity box, due to them being second and third party programs.

There has to be a program running. I see this all the time. Sometimes they are not so easy to find. If running WIN98 or ME, run MSCONFIG and disable all startup and don't run system.ini or win.ini. If running WIN95 use Startup Cop. You will have to identify the software causing the disk writes. The only other option is boot DOS Mode command prompt only and then use the DOS version of Scandisk. Sometimes it is a pain to find the culprit software, but I assure you it is there somewhere. Yahoo, AIM, HP multifunction units and several printers cause this problem, or any software that does monitoring, like CD Burning software, etc. Look in system.ini [386 enh] for drivers, etc. that you don't recognize. Check Win.ini for Load= Run= programs.Microsoft has this un-helpful article: http://support.microsoft.com/support/kb/articles/Q222/4/69.ASP

This question was auto closed due to inactivity