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Scandisk hangs at 20% can't load Win98

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by viamontelee

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First,I have a 500mz(overclocked) AMD K6-2 running Win 98SE, the hd (Maxtor # 90680D4) has about 2GB free out of a total 6,with 128mb RAM. Normally the system runs pretty stable,that is until recently.In the(final?)windows session I was on Realtor.com for about two hours experiencing lockups failed picture loads,etc. Shutdown was uneventful. But before that(surfing Realtor.com) I had recently downloaded the Audiogalaxy program and was pretty impressed with the performance.But not enough to uninstall Napster.There were a few instances where I had them open simultaneously (not in search mode) and freaky things seemed to happen like gpfs and lockups so I didn't do that anymore.I had the program for less than two days. Next day after said shutdown I tried to boot the pc and got the "error in loading gdi.exe Reinstall Windows" message.I reset the pc and it went to the setup screen where I chose to run in safe mode but instead of loading safe mode it flipped back to the MS WINDOWS 98 STARUPMENU screen except the scandisk prompt was at the bottom of the window (in which case there is no choice but to run Scandisk ). Scandisk stopped at 20% with the following error message: "Scandisk encountered a data error while reading cluster 18,385. Scandisk will try to continue past this error. When skandisk offers to perform a surface scan on this drive choose Yes". When I hit ok I can hear the hd clicking(normal sound)but it hangs at 20% (the longest I let it hang was 1.5 hours. I have tried running scandisk at the dos prompt and instead it hangs 8% while checking the directory structure.
If it is a virus can spinrite help? I've read in previous discussions that I can download Norton Utilities (trial) and that may help - or am I too fargone???

4 replies

by dmiles

Try turning of any apps that is running in the background before running scandisk,Use MSDOS mode to run scan disk,disable anti virus and try running scan disk
Use MSCONFIG to disable some of the programs loading at start up.

by viamontelee

Now I'm totally confused! I don't think I have any apps running because I can't even load windows(see title)and I think I mentioned in my long message that scandisk even hangs in msdos mode,I think scandisk is probably impeding me more than anythingat this point that's why I am leaning towards 3rd party utilities (see end of message)Is spinrite ($89) worth the try or am I dead in the water?

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