I use maintenence wizard, trying to defrag. In safe mode: First I use scan disk, first on standard, then on thorough. when it starts to defrag, I get a message that says my drive has errors on it and needs to be fixed first with scandisk. A vicous cycle. Any suggestions?

Try it from DOS and try the /autofix switch /AUTOFIX Fixes damage without prompting you first. By default, if you start ScanDisk with the /AUTOFIX switch and ScanDisk finds lost clusters on your drive, it saves the lost clusters as files in the drive's root directory. To have ScanDisk delete lost clusters rather than saving them, include the /NOSAVE switch. (If you use the /AUTOFIX switch and ScanDisk finds errors, it still prompts you for an Undo disk; to prevent this, include the /NOSUMMARY switch.) You cannot use the /AUTOFIX switch in conjunction with the /CHECKONLY or /CUSTOM switches. http://users.cybercity.dk/~bse26236... it could be the drive is on it's way out, so backup.