You could have a bad hard drive, then.

How old is this machine? It's not common for a hard drive to have bad sectors-- generally, when you have a bad hard drive, the system can freeze or a diagnostic program can restart when it hits the error on the disk. Additionally, check to see if the hard drive cables are firmly seated into the drive.

Can you run Scandisk from DOS?

my computer is aging; 4 years

sorry; I am not savy enough to run anything from from DOS


but why will my Norton utilities not run either ??

:o

East ,just boot computer with a windows bootdisk,and type scandisk at the DOS prompt .If you don't have a bootdisk create one in control panel ,add remove programs ,create boot disk ,you will need a clean floppy disk to do this !
Or download this one and extract it to the floppy !
http://www.24by7.ca/files/boot98se.exe

ran scandisk from DOS; no problem to run; no problems uncovered'

So; something else is going on, but what ?

:eek:

Sounds like you've still got something running which is accessing the disk during the time of your scans. When you say there's nothing obvious running in the background, does that include not only programs but processes as well?

Ah; Processes.................hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm

stumped me once again; please elaborate

thanks

Processes in this sense could be described as "system level" applications I guess- programs that are running in the background performing certain tasks, but not necessarily programs that a user has explicitly started or is interacting with. For example, your anti-virus software's real-time protection/system monitoring component, print spooling software, or power management software would all qualify as processes. Many processes are started automatically when Windows starts, and if they make changes to your disk/directory structure while you are running certain utilities (disk scanning or defragmenting utilities especially), they can cause those utilities to either hang completely or simply restart whatever function they were performing from the beginning.

Unfortunately, Windows 95/98's Task Manager doesn't list or allow you to manipulate your running processes if I recall correctly; it only lists open applications. If a backgroung process really is the culprit here, you'll need to find a third-party Task Manager replacement which gives you finer control than Windows' stock manager. (Win 2000/XP's Task Manager does list process information).

OK; guess I am stuck with running scandisk and Norton from DOS...........better than nothing


thanks for the input

True, and the scans will probably run faster than they do under the Windows GUI. :mrgreen: