Scandisk won't complete

I have the same problem as "Cynic" (previous post) so waited to see what advice he was given but he seems to have cured his problem by repairing a disk error. Any guesses as to what he might have done?

When Scandisk starts it says "Checking File allocation tables" then changes to "Checking folders ", gets as far as 5 blue squares then repeatedly re-starts. Eventually I get a warning headed 'Scandisk-Local Disk C:' saying, Scandisk has started 10 times because Windows or another program has been writing to the drive. Quitting some running programs may enable Scandisk to finish sooner. Do you want to continue receiving this warning? So I quit Scandisk.

I do a CTRL+ALT+DELETE and the following programs are in 'Close Program'
Explorer
Avgemc
Avgcc
Sfagent
Epson cardmonitor1
Systray
Pctvoice
Winmgmt
Kpf4gui
Mdm

I close them all down except for Explorer and Kpf4gui which won't go and try Scandisk again. This time Scandisk is variable but never gets past the 19th blue square (about 70%) before re-starting.

I have done a virus check and tried unchecking some of the startups in msconfig. All to no avail. Scandisk will just not complete even if started in MSdos.

Kind regards,
Pat

 

Hi Pat,

have you tried in safe mode and disabling the screen saver?

Regards - Charles

 

Thankyou once again Charles. It did a full Scandisk in Safe Mode as you suggested. It completed OK, gave a full readout and said that it found no errors. On coming back into Normal Mode Scandisk will still not complete past the 5 blue squares but I can live with that now I have made a note to do it in Safe Mode.

Kind regards,
Pat

 

My Scandisk froze with no error messages (5 blocks) only during a warm reboot -- it just sat and sulked. A cold boot gave no problem. Like yourself I took solace in the fact that if I hit Cancel then the OS opened quite happily, and Scandisk ran within the OS with no problem.

Very odd. At the time of solution, steps followed showed no logic at all. Ran Scandisk after cold boot -- no problems. Followed immediately with Defrag which halted with message of disk error, did I want to repair? -- Yup. Subsequently no problem with warm reboot. Inexplicable.

 

Thankyou "Born Cynic" for you information. I have just tried to do a Defrag in Windows normal mode but after 5 minutes no blue blocks appeared and pressing "Show Details" just presented a blank Full Defrag window. I re-started in Safe mode and a Defrag warning said the drive contained errors that must first be repaired and suggested a Scandisk. Scandisk completed okay and said it found errors on the disk and had fixed them all and 0 bytes in bad sector. This time Defrag worked fine in Safe mode. I then restarted in normal mode but still only 5 blue blocks when I ran Scandisk, but none as before with Defrag. I then wondered if the reason was because for some time now I have been starting in 'msconfig' Selective mode. I am doing this because I have 13 programs under the 'Startup tab' which are unnecessary and are reducing the performance to 67% as opposed to 78% without them, but I am loath to go into the Registry to remove them! Anyway I tried restarting with the full msconfig. complement but neither Scandisk nor Defrag would work in normal mode. However as before I suppose I can live with this knowing they will both complete in Safe mode!

Kind regards,
Pat

 

Hi Pat,

I then wondered if the reason was because for some time now I have been starting in 'msconfig' Selective mode.
No, I really don't think so, lots of users do this w/o any affects on defrag or scandisk, and can't think of why it would. I had programs that I disabled from starting up.

However as before I suppose I can live with this knowing they will both complete in Safe mode!
FWIW, I don't find anything wrong with doing these operations in safe mode, my perferred way of doing them, in XP as I used to do in ME.

One more point: in XP, if the user wants to do a Chkdisk, scandisk equivalent, XP will schedule it to run on the next bootup - before the apps load, in other words in safe mode.

Regards - Charles

 

Thanks for confirmation Charles. One day sometime in the future a warning will appear in Windows after bootup saying, "MS has checked everything and will allow no problems to spoil your day no matter what you do. This comes backed by a $1,000,000 guarantee which if necessary will be deducted from Bill's petty cash account ". Thus when immediately after another obscure warning appears like, "Saving the autorecovery file is postponed for this file" I promise to split the money with you Charles. Meanwhile

Kind regards
Pat