Scandisk and defrag won't work

I have been trying to run scandisk and defrag on my computer but neither of
them are able to complete or even make much progress at all. With scandisk i
keep getting the error message that it has restarted more than 10 times. With the defrag the status monitor doesn't move from 0% completed. I tried
restarting my comp in safe mode but i couldn't get that to work either. I
tried it twice; once holding down the ctrl key and the other time by holding
down the F8 key. Is there another way to restart the comp in safe mode? Would it be better to do the scandisk and defrag in MS DOS mode? If so, once i'm in ms dos, how do i get back to windows (or just shut the computer down from ms dos)? I've barely ever used ms dos so i am almost completely ignorant about it. Thanks in advance for the help.

P.S. I forgot to mention I'm running Win98 and I did check previous posts similar to my problem but none of them addressed what to do if you're having problems restarting in safe mode and how to get out of ms dos.

 

Member

When I ran Windows 98 this problem was caused by AntiVirus software. When I shutdown the AntiVirus software it ran fine.
Hope this helps.

 

I find it is very difficult to find the correct point to press F8 on my computer as well.

Easiest way:
Go to Start -> Run, enter msconfig, on the first tab (General) click the Advanced button, check Enable Start Menu.
Reverse to disable Start Menu.

Matt