Defrag and chkdsk problems

Hello, all. If you can bear with a novice in his time of frustration, it would be appreciated. Over the past week my computer has been randomly shutting down. Black screen on the monitor and the status(?) light on the tower changes from solid green to blinking amber. This may not be relevant, but I'm trying to provide as much information as possible. Not knowing if this is a hardware or software problem, I decided to try a few fixes. The first was to run defrag because my system had been running a bit slow. When I attempted to defrag the hard drive, I get a "Disk defragmenter has detected that chkdsk is scheduled to run on the volume: (C: ). Please run chkdsk /f." message.

So, I try to run chkdsk /f from the command prompt, but I get "the type of the file system is NTFS. Cannot lock current drive. Chkdsk cannot run because the volume is in use by another process." in response. I'm asked if I want to run chkdsk upon system restart. I type "Y" and reboot. I look for any chkdsk related processes that I might be able to see running during the reboot, but I don't see any and guess that the process might just not be viewable or whatever. I try to defrag again and get the same message as before. Any ideas?

 

Check your power options in the control panel. You probably have either system standby or hibernate turned on.

 

Alright. I checked power options and hibernate was turned on. So, I turned it off and tried to defrag the hard drive. Same message appears. Do I need to reboot?

 

I am having the same problem that Blablo describes. I did as you suggested above, rebooted, tried defrag & got the same error message. I've gone to command prompt to try to run chkdsk C:/f and it gives the same error message that Blablo quoted. I tried rebooting from a Dell utilities CD and running ckhdsk with no luck, and tried scandisk which found no errors, which I don't believe. The computer seems to be running fine, just a bit slow.

Can anyone help, please?

I have a Dell Dimension 4400 running Windows XP.

Thanks.

 

Are you running Spyware Doctor 3.5? There is/was an issue with that program which can cause the problem you are having.

 

No, I do not have Spyware Doctor.

I have not changed, installed or uninstalled any software or hardware since I defragged approximately a month ago. At that time I had no problems at all.

Thanks for your reply.