Help: Scandisk Takes Too Long

Scan**** takes 12 hours! I have a 40gb 7200rpm hard drive, Amd Athlon
2100, 512mb ram, Leadtek NForce Motherboard, Win98se. I scan and
defrag once a month. This has happened with other motherboards and
CPU's. I ctrl-alt-del everything but the necessities. Everything else runs fine but Scandisk. It hardly finds any
errors and never any bad sectors. Is my hard drive going bad? Is there
a way to fix this?

 

Change the options not to check for bad sectors, you are checking 1,250,000,000 clusters. It is not going bad, just the sheer amount that is being checked for being bad, each one is done one at a time.
Open Scandisk, and select Standard to do this.
If you want check for bad clusters, it is done faster in dos, by Restarting in Dos Mode, type in this command;
scandisk /surface