A short while after i start the defragmenting process, it stops and says that there is a portion of my harddrive that is unaccessable and tells me to do a thorough scandisk. I did infact do a thorough scandisk, which took 6 hours on a 40 gig drive for me. The catch is, at the end, i found that out of about 1,250,000 cells on my Harddrive, approx. 22k of those cells are corrupt or something. It asks me to repair the error for every single one of those!!!! i didnt want to do this manually so i restarted the scandisk using autuomatically repair errors. 10 hours later, its still only fixed a few thousand cells....... :( does anyone know what what kind of problem this is besides my harddrive being a piece of crap? and is there another way to get around this? Thx alot. ^_^

unfortunatly you should let the scandisk correct it. what it is really doing is writing the info around the errors that it cant fix. you can also reformat the hard drive if you want but you will lose anything you dont back up. have you run your virus scan to check for any viruses? something has corrupted part of your hard drive its fixable. let scandisk do its job

i agree with teamsouth. before you go to bed turn off the screensaver, start scandisk and check fix auto, turn off the monitor and go to bed.

I thought reformatting would solve this problem on my computer too, but it didn't. After reformatting, I reinstalled Windows and ran scandisk, and it went to the same point as before. Apparently, the only thing you can do is keep setting scandisk to run when you aren't using the computer and hope that it completes its scan sometime before the next millenium. Since I couldn't wait that long before defragging, I bought a third party defrag program {Ontrack Utilities}, and it is doing a good job.

My OnTrack experience is a little different. This is from a letter I sent to Ontrack: As a result of PC World’s recommendation of your Systems Suite 3 as the best of the bunch, I bought it—online/mail order—from buy.com. Although I didn’t need all the utilities, I thought I got a bargain. I really wanted a registry cleaner and a better defragmenter. The defragmenter was very slow the first time around, which was understandable. It was just as slow the second time around. I used EasyUpdate, which downloaded new virus definitions, and an update to JetDefrag, which was supposed to make it faster. After the update, it wouldn’t even finish defragmenting, because it said “something else was running in the background” (or something like that). Nothing else was running. I used the registry fixer, and it came up with more than 200 items, some of which were pre-checked. They ALL had white backgrounds ["safe to delete"], and I reviewed each one; some I left unchecked. So I cleaned the registry. Shortly thereafter, some of my shortcuts on the desktop didn’t work. (I couldn’t access SpeedDisk with either my shortcut or through Norton System Works 2001.) So I undid the changes, and everything is back to normal. ***** Needless to say, I sent it back to Ontrack 7/31 per their satisfaction guarantee and asked for my money back. I'm still waiting. ***** Although there are a lot of things not to like about Norton, I use and like their SpeedDisk defragger.

That's the most frustrating thing about computers. Software that works perfectly on one machine can totally screw up a different computer, even though they both use the same operating system. Do you think the manufacturers are doing it on purpose to keep us buying?

thx guys, i appreciate the advice. And yes, i have norton 2001 and i do by-weekly scans. i also have zonealarm firewall. I guess i'll just use scandisk :)