Why did you try and run scandisk in normal mode? You've established that
it runs in Safe Mode and that should be sufficient. There can be many
reasons why it runs in Safe Mode but not in Normal mode including having
your disk set up as a single large partition and having other applications
such as anti-virus and firewalls running and writing logs to your hard
disk all of which meaning that scandisk exits early before completing its
work.

Turning now to your Defrag problems, again I would advise you to stick to
Safe Mode and forget about running defrag in normal mode. You say it
stops at 57%. What was the error message you saw at this time? How big
is your hard disk? How much free space do you have on the hard disk?

You might want to try deleting the contents of the folder
C:\Windows\Applog. This may help speed up defrag but you won't get the
placement of files optimised in the same away you would have it you hadn't
deleted the contents of the Applog folder. Problems in this area usually
throw up a DEFRAG00205 error when defragging. For more details see MS KB
238165 - "Defrag Error Message: ID NoEFRAG00205"
(http://support.microsoft.com?kbid=238165).
--
Mike Maltby MS-MVP



Joanne wrote:

Mike Maltby. I followed your instructions step by step
and got into Safe mode okay using MSconfig; and Scandisk
worked perfectly but Defrag stopped at 57%. I then came
out of Safe mode and went into Normal and ran Scandisk
again and it stopped at about 20%. Defrag also stopped in
Normal again at 57%. I am now at a loss as to what to
do. Can you help me further please. This is driving me
crazy.