scandisk on bootup

I have a windows 98 machine that is running a scandisk on
bootup. It stalls at 20% and PC needs to be rebooted.
Can't exit from scandisk either. Can I work around this?
how can I get into windows again? I tried booting in
safemode, but it does the same thing. Please help.

try scandisk after booting to "command prompt"

"Jason" wrote in message
...
I have a windows 98 machine that is running a scandisk on
bootup. It stalls at 20% and PC needs to be rebooted.
Can't exit from scandisk either. Can I work around this?
how can I get into windows again? I tried booting in
safemode, but it does the same thing. Please help.

-----Original Message-----
try scandisk after booting to "command prompt"

"Jason" wrote in
message
...
I have a windows 98 machine that is running a scandisk
on
bootup. It stalls at 20% and PC needs to be rebooted.
Can't exit from scandisk either. Can I work around
this?
how can I get into windows again? I tried booting in
safemode, but it does the same thing. Please help.



.
Can't do it. Says I am missing a bunch of files and stuff
and I can't run scandisk

You might try adding "AutoScan=3D0" to the "[Options]" section
of "c:\msdos.sys" on the problem computer.

Ben

"Jason" wrote in message =
...
I have a windows 98 machine that is running a scandisk on=20
bootup. It stalls at 20% and PC needs to be rebooted.=20
Can't exit from scandisk either. Can I work around this? =20
how can I get into windows again? I tried booting in=20
safemode, but it does the same thing. Please help.

On Sat, 26 Jun 2004 17:33:34 -0400, "Ben Myers"

You might try adding "AutoScan=0" to the "[Options]" section
of "c:\msdos.sys" on the problem computer.

Yes, that should shoot the messanger, so it will come as a "big
surprise" when you lose all your data later.

"Jason" wrote

I have a windows 98 machine that is running a scandisk on
bootup. It stalls at 20% and PC needs to be rebooted.

"needs to be rebooted", eh? More likely has gone off into some
deeply-nested and thus multiplied retries.

There's a reason for that, and it's one worth taking note of.

Can't exit from scandisk either. Can I work around this?

Yes, but if the cause is what I think it is, you don't want to.

how can I get into windows again?

Wrong question, for now.

There are two reasons why Scandisk will automatically run on startup:

1) Interrupted file operations

This is the "normal" automatic disk check that follows a "bad exit",
which causes a "file operations in progress" bit to be left set within
the file system, thus prompting the check to repair errors in the file
system's logical structure.

If you don't properly shutdown, then stop doing that and properly
shutdown. If you *can't* properly shut down (because of shutdown
hangs or system lockups/crashes/reboots) then troubleshoot those
problems. If you do shutdown properly but see this all the time, then
suspect a bug where the ATX power is turned off too soon, so that data
written to the HD but still held in the HD's own cache RAM is lost
before it's written to the disk platters - get the fix!

2) Disk surface failure

There's another bit in the file system that's set whenever an attempt
to access the hard disk fails. If this is set at boot time, an
automatic check is made not only of the file system logic, but also
the disk surface itself. This a FAR more serious situation that
should be taken very seriously indeed; forget "how do I run Windows"
(you shouldn't - it's unsafe to do so) and go to data recovery.

Failure to access disk should not happen, ever. But when it does,
some mechanisms may attempt to hide rather than highlight the problem
(you know, like Watergate and subsequent *gate scandals?).

The HD's own firmware will usually try to "fix" the failing sector on
the fly, by reading it repeatedly until no CRC error, then writing the
contents to a spare sector, and then fixing up the beneath-the-OS raw
sector addressing to use the new one instead. It will bang it's head
on this repeatedly for so long it looks like a hard lockup, rather
than return an error code that indicates bad disk. Go figure.



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Reality is that which, when you stop believing
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