I have a dell inspiron 8000. I have Windows ME on it. My scandisk does not work. The only way I can scandisk is through safe mode. And even Defrag does not work.PLZ HELP

What errors do you get? Does scandisk work in safe mode ok? Before you run scan disk, Do ctrl-alt-del and end all tasks except explorer and systray. Try scan disk again.

I have the Dell Inspiron 8000 also and experienced the same problem. I never did get Scandisk to run except in safe mode. I contacted Dell and they had no explanation for it, except that "it should work". Not very helpful. I am able to get Defrag to work okay, thankfully. So I can't offer any fixes, but wanted to let you know that it wasn't just your computer.

More often than not, it is applications that are open that are causing you problems. Screen savers sometimes cause a problem too. (Set screen saver to none). Try the following to reduce the likelihood of all this happening. Click the taskbar button for each running program and close it, saving your data first. Repeat until you see no taskbar buttons for running programs. Open Control Panel, double-click the Display option, click the Screen Saver tab, and set your screen saver to None. Close the Display dialog box. Open Control Panel and look for a Find Fast icon. (If you've never installed Microsoft Office, you can safely skip this step.) If you see this icon, double-click it, pull down the Index menu, and choose Pause Indexing. Close Find Fast and close Control Panel Shut down any antivirus or security software and other system-level utilities you have loaded. You can usually do this by right-clicking the antivirus program's icon in the lower right side of the taskbar and using the shortcut menu. Press Ctrl+Alt+Del to pop up the Close Program list. For every program listed except Explorer and Systray, select the program's name from the list and click the End Task button. Repeat until the only entries left are Explorer and Systray. Click Cancel to get rid of the Close Program dialog box. I would suggest that you defragment your disk afterwards too.

If I want to do an advanced scandisk, I boot with a bootdisk, choose to boot without cd-romsupport, and then type this:
scandisk c:
First there will be some normal checks, then you will be asked if you want to do a surface-test. It never failed on my computer (while the windows-version did...)
For the defrag-problem, close all programs, as mentionned above, then try to defrag with another program (like Vopt Millenium or one of the Norton Utilities. There are also others, you can do a search with google.)

Johan

I had a similar problem, your problem could either be because :

1.You have a bad sector on your HD or
2.Another program continuously keeps writing to your HD...(primary drive)

In my case that program was Norton Anti-virus 2001... once i uninstalled and then installed McAfee anti -virus the problem was fixed ..... try you're losing nothing ..

Otherwise you can use scandisk in safemode .... it gets the job done doesn't it??