Number 222 - November 2001

Problem Running Scandisk and Defrag
by Carl Tenning, Tacoma Open Group for Microcomputers
My computer seemed to be slowing down, so I decided to run DEFRAG. I had previously run DEFRAG successfully, but this time it would never get beyond 0% complete. Clicking on the Show Details button, it would display only the white screen and show "Checking drive for errors". I let the computer run overnight, but it never progressed beyond that point, although there was frequent disk access and the graphic icon in the Defragmenting Drive C: window remained active. So I know that the application had not stopped.     The next thing I did was to search the internet to see if anyone else had had the same problem. While there were numerous defrag problems reported, none described the same symptoms that I had. The best advice I could find was to run SCANDISK first and then run DEFRAG. But then I found SCANDISK had a problem too. I had previously encountered the problem where SCANDISK would repeatedly restart because some other application had written to the disk. I knew that the screen saver and virus checker had to be turned off as well as using MSCONFIG.EXE to do a selective startup with all of the boxes unchecked1. But even doing these things, SCANDISK continued to restart and never ran to completion. So now what?	I found a Microsoft KnowledgeBase article, Q218160 that finally solved the problem. The solution was to first delete the Applog folder from C:\WINDOWS and run Disk Cleanup. Next, modify the Scandisk.ini file in the [Environment] section to set NumPasses=5 and then run SCANDISK in real-mode by booting to the MS-DOS prompt. This got SCANDISK to successfully complete.     Next I rebooted Windows in the safe mode and ran Defrag and it too completed successfully.     Here are some tips I found for running SCANDISK and DEFRAG from a normal Windows environment:     1. Set screen saver to "None"     2. Disable virus protection.     3. Use Ctrl-Alt-Del to shutdown all applications except Explorer and Systray.     1 See March 2000 TOGGLE or click here
Number 222 - November 2001