Hidden program?

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I started having random hangs running Windows 98SE. My disk is 20GB, partitioned into quarters by PowerQuest PartitionMagic. I ran Defrag which hit a problem and directed me to run ScanDisk in the “Thorough” mode.

I was running in Safe Mode. My Win.ini Load= and Run= lines are both empty. The system tray was empty. I powered down my external cable modem. I checked Ctrl-Alt-Delete and the only program listed was Explorer.

After about two hours of testing the C: partition (5GB), Scandisk reported that it had had to restart 10 times because somebody was writing to the disk.

I don’t see what it could have been — or is ScanDisk just too stupid to recognize itself??? Where else could a program be that was accessing the disk?

TIA
Donald

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Try using the msconfig program before running a scandisk or defrag.

Start –> Run “msconfig”

Select “Selective Startup” and remove only the tick beside “Load Startup Group items”.

Click OK, and restart the computer as requested.

Run Scandisk and/or defrag from here, and when complete, return to msconfig, and select normal startup.

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I thought starting in Safe mode did this. I’ll give it a try, though.

Are you suggesting that there can be things running that don’t show in the Ctrl-Alt-Del window?

Thanks,
Donald

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There can be many things running that do not show when you Control-Alt-Delete. In addition to the previous msconfig suggestion, do the following:

With your mouse, Go to
Start
Run
Type “msinfo32” (No Quotes)
Click OK

Select Software Environment-Running Tasks, this will give you a much more thorough listing of the software running “behind the scenes”, and may point you to the offending program.

JamesB

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Could you have a screen saver or power management active. They don’t show up under Ctrl+Alt+Del, but can affect scandisk.

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I forgot that in my initial post. The first thing I did was kill the screen saver and shut off power management. Since I had powered down the cable modem, I also made sure that my virus scan and firewall were not running.

So I’m still looking.

Thanks,
Donald

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