Hi techies, i'm having a big problem with my old laptop..its a gateway solo2000. while attempting to reboot my laptop, i received an error message: While initializing device vkd, windows protection error. I already tried to run it in the command prompt only and tried also tried to run a scandisk by typing the command: c:/ scandisk/surface. however, during the microsoft scandisk process everything went smooth up untill it reaches the scan surface part.. it stopped at a 5% level. Please help me, and thank you for your time

A program, probably one that loads when you start your computer, is making writes to your hard drive and interfering with Defrag and Scandisk, causing them to re-start over and over. Boot into DOS (F8 at startup and select command line). You can then run scandisk or defrag from the dos prompt by typing scandisk or defrag. The disadvantage of this is the Dos version of scandisk cannot repair everything the Windows version can OR Start your computer in safe mode (F8 at startup and select Safe mode) and then defrag or scandisk. OR Get rid of the loading of un-necessary Startup programs altogether. Start - Run - type: msconfig - look under Startup tab. Some are default Windows ones - ScanRegistry, System Tray, TaskMonitor, LoadPowerProfile, SchedulingAgent - they are supposed to run all the time, and are necessary for the normal operation of windows - normally they can be left as is. There will also be at least one entry for something to do with your video display adapter, usually identifiable by something indicating a brand or model name of the adapter (e.g. ATI....). If you use a software firewall, there will be at least one entry for that. There will be at least one entry for your anti-virus program (e.g. Norton Anti Virus - name usually starts with NAV). Everything else other than these entries can be disabled by clicking on the box to the left to remove the checkmark. Try disabling everything not necessary and see if your problem goes away. You can also disable your screen saver if you use one (particularily if it did not come with Windows, they can interfere), motherboard monitoring (voltages, rpm's) software that is running all the time, etc.

thanks for the reply mike, i tried your instructions to run it in a safemode. Unfortunately, it can't load the windows program..and it frozed during the windows 98 opening screen. thanks for all the help

Sounds like you may have a problem with your hard disk. Try booting to a Windows 98 Startup Disk (EBD), and run scandisk from the A:\> prompt with a scandisk C: command. You may have to change the boot order in the BIOS setup.

I am having this same problem...scandisk from dos says "data error in cluster 84584..say yes when asked for surface scan", but I cannot get to surface scan without this error - Scandisk has detected a long file name entry on this drive but was unable to fix it. Is there any recourse but to format and start over ? My wife is hounding me to restore her pst outlook file, but every time I try to dir it, I get "data error reading drive C" I think it is fubar. Thanks for any tips, Tom