Is there anyway I can skip the scan disk during win98 boot up without having to be physically present to press space bar. my pc restarts automatically and if I am not there it starts surface scan and just stops at the point where I have to press to fix a problem.

You can run msconfig, choose advanced and check 'disable scandisk after bad shutdown'. But you should be more concerned about why scandisk is running when you start up and why it's finding problems.

I am wandering why it is restarting on its own? Is this something you have it set to do?

This may seem like a stupid question but how are you shutting down windows ? If you are shutting down normally, ignore this question, if you are just turning off your computer then scandisk will run everytime you boot up. You may have scandisk to run in your task scheduler maintenance or other other program your using. You could try editing it out of these or your autoexec.bat or autoexec.config files. It's hard to answer your question as there are so many reasons as to why scandisk is running. Even a long filename can initiate scandisk to run as Windows may not be able to make repairs via scandisk. This and and many other things could cause scandisk to run on bootup as Scandisk is unable to repair the problem. If all else fails, reinstall Windows as this will often times repair the problem.

Look in Scheduled tasks (via My Computer). It's quite possibly been setup to do it. Go to Advanced/Stop Using Task Scheduler to see if it makes any difference. I realise this has been mentioned in passing but I thought it worth spelling out. D

There are two flags in each boot sector of each partition that are used to detect the shutdown state of the previous Windows session. One does the standard scan, the other does the surface scan. They are only reset to no-scan status if scandisk is allowed to 'fix' and scan to completion. Either bootup mode or Windows scandisk will reset the flags to no scan at startup. You are in a serious situation if scandisk attempts a surface scan automatically - you better read up on which options you don't want in scandisk.ini (<read it) file as scandisk can ruin your file system if you allow it too much permision to fix everything it finds wrong. You should allow scandisk to do it's thing to completion with your supervision and then go about setting it to not run automatically as per DAVEINCAPS advice if you want to do that. You'll have to scandisk manually and regularly from then on if you want to play it 'safe'.

The other snag with allowing automatic fix is that you don't realise when the HD is about to fail until it's very late in the day (possibly too late to save your stuff). D