ScanDisk & Disk Disk Defragmenter & Thumbnail View ( A bit lengthy)

On Wed, 18 Oct 2006 11:23:53 -0500, "SGB"

ScanDisk will not go do anything, except go back and forth from "Checking
file allocation tables..." and "Checking folders". The bar does not appear.
Then, the typical "ScanDisk has restarted 10 times..." error message
appears.

Disk Defragmenter will not go beyond "0% complete". Show Details is
completely blank. It will run continuously until I stop it.

It's the same problem.

In Win9x, anything that writes to the volume being Scandisk'd or
Defrag'd will cause these processes to start again from the beginning.

This is by design, as any change to the file system (as any file write
operations will do) invalidates the working assumption base for these
tools, and can thus lead to data loss should they continue.

So what you need to do, is:
- suppress everything that writes to disk
- if still no joy, formally exclude malware

To exclude things writing to disk, do this:
- unplug all networks, Internet, and disable all wireless
- unplug all peripherals, e.g. printers and scanners
- close all other apps that are visible on Taskbar
- close all (f)utilities that are visible in SysTray
- close all other tasks visible in Ctl+Alt+Del Task Manager
- disable the screensaver

It may be easier to suppress stuff loading at startup, rather than
chasing them "live" via Ctl+Alt+Del and End Task, e.g. either...
- Safe Mode
- MSConfig suppression of all startup items

BTW, Zone Alarm is one of the things that can do this, and that may
surprise you in the same way that FastFind etc. would not.

If you've done all the above and still have the problem, then test
Safe Mode against MSConfig suppression. If Safe Mode works, you may
have a malware amenable to HiJackThis management; if Safe Mode also
fails, you may need to do a formal av scan looking for intrafile
malware, such as a generic code-infecting virus.

If you have 32M RAM or less, then the best way to do this is using a
Win98 EBD to boot into DOS mode, then any one/more of several
DOS-based av scanners from F-Prot, Sophos, NOD32, Kaspersky etc.

If you have 64M or more, then you could also use a Bart CDR and
certain Windows-based av scanners that can be plugged into it. This
is a more powerful solution, but requires the XP SP2 or later code
set, and has a steeper learning curve to create tools than DOS mode.


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Error Messages Are Your Friends
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