My Scandisk will not complete a task, saying that it had to restart 10 times due to something writing to the C: drive. I also tried to run disk defragmenter overnight and in the morning it hadn't even completed 1%. Do you have any suggestions on how to fix this? Why doesn't Scandisk work? When the Scandisk tries restarting 10 times without success, there's something blocking the program, like the screen saver program. When the Scandisk just hangs there and nothing appears to be done, there is a reason for this. I just haven't discovered it yet.

The reason for this happening is simple. If any other program is running when Scandisk is operating, it will force Scandisk to start over from the beginning because the state of files has changed. If this is ScanDisk on Win98, this is a common problem and there is a way to get around it. Here's how:

  1. Create a blank text file.
  2. Enter the following text into it:
    REGEDIT4

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESoftwareMicrosoftWindowsCurrentVersionRunOnceEx]
"Flags"=dword:00000003
"Title"="ScanDisk at Startup"

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESoftwareMicrosoftWindowsCurrentVersionRunOnceExA
ScanDisk]
"Cmd"="||SCANDSKW.EXE /A"
  3. Save the file as SCANDISK.REG.
  4. Double-click on the file to enter it into the Registry.
  5. The next time you reboot, Scandisk will be run BEFORE Windows finishes loading, and will this avoid problems with other programs.

You can relaunch the REG file any time you want to do this again on another reboot.


This was first published in March 2002

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