scan disk/ windows errors

[green3500]

Hi,

trying to help out a friend with pc problems. Don't know her computer specs except that she is running a P133 with W98SE. HD is about 20 GB, reportedly the whole system is about 5 years old.

She complained of a lot of freeze-ups, boot problems (hangs, windows doesn't start), fatal exception errors, etc. We went through a series of "try this" suggestions: She reinstalled Windows, reinstalled MSOffice, reionstalled MSIE, all without problems. Dumped her temp files and cleared out a lot of old programs. Still having some of the problems, though generally things have improved on the performance end of it.

While I was there, I tried to run scandisk and defrag. Defrag wanted to run scanndisk first, but when I tried, scandisk constantly kept restarting. It gave me a message telling me to shut down all other programs because windows was writing to the HD which interrupted scanning. Screen saver was off. Ctrl+alt+del: all other programs turned off. Still would not scan. Still did not get it to work.

I illegally quit windows and restarted the PC, and it scanned prior to restarting windows. No error messages came up.

Is this a bad sector problem? HD problem? Windows problem? Not sure what else to try.

Thanks!

[Hot Rod]

Was there an Antivirus program running when you attempted the Scandisk? It won't show up in the task manager.

Have you tried wiping the disk clean (reformatting) and installing Windows from scratch.

[green3500]

I believe we diasabled the antivirus as well. She has MacAfee and has not been able to upgrade it for some reason.

Have not tried a reformat yet - was trying to avoid that, as she would first have to relocate a lot of Word Documents ans some other data files.

Question: if the HD has bad sectors, won't it still have problems even with a reformat?

thanks!

[Hot Rod]

Yes it would. But a reformat would determine if it is truly a hardware problem or if it is a software problem.

[Cheryl]

Have you tried running scan disk in safe mode? It might finish there. Also, I think there are some type of utilities to find out if hdd is going. You could try doing a search on google for that.

Good luck.

Cheryl