Hello Folks How many times have I told other people "If it ain't broke, don't fix it"? But we all like to tinker with our systems don't we! So, although, amongst other overnight utilities, my machine runs defrag at 0235 every Saturday morning and has never reported a disk problem, guess what I have done! Well, I have had this disk for 3 years and have never run a full surface scan with ScanDisk so why not do it now? (Maybe the 32deg temperature today affected my brain!) Anyway, I did it. It said it had found a couple of dodgy sectors and had isolated 65Kb of my disk and told me to run the standard Scandisk on exit to make sure errors had been fixed. I did that; no errors found. However, prior to running this scan I had 6.99GB of free disk space and started up with firewall/antivirus leaving 84% resources free. Now I had 4.25GB of free diskspace and start up with 72% resources. Let's try Defrag thought I. It won't run! Says "Cannot defragment this drive because Windows cannot access part of your drive. To repair your drive click Scandisk (choose Thorough option) and then try Defragmentation again. Done that three times!! At 3+hrs per scan watching paint dry would be positively exciting. Now in the old days of DOS, Assembler, Clipper etc and we weren't afraid to get amongst the FAT's with a hex editor I may have some idea of where to go from here. But now, it's over to you guys who grew up with Windows and "Yes!" Mike I would like your help as long as it isn't "XP will solve all your problems!" Regards Stuart

I've solved the resources problem. Disk space and defrag problems still need sorting. Regards Stuart

what is listed in the end task windows/what programs? It almost sounds like a worm.

Hello Mike Funny site this. I just replied to you but it hasn't shown up. I'll try again. Normal Scandisk show no problems and exit code is "0". Virus/Adware/Spyware scans are clear. If by "end task windows" you mean what I would call Alt/Ctl/Del there is nothing unusual there. However, though full disk scan also exits with "0" I have set the log file to "Append" so am able to find text exit message of "Error writing to your drive. ScanDisk may have corrected this error when it performed a surface scan. However, other errors may remain on your drive. Resolution: Ignore this error and continue Results: Error was not corrected." Unfortunately, it does not delineate the error nor does it offer any suggestions as to how to resolve it. Does that you help any? (It does nothing for me!) Regards Stuart.

If the virus is in the boot sector you can't use scandisk effectively to get rid of it.The only solution is erasing the hard drive with a free program (free for first physical drive only) like Active@Killdisk boot disk and use fdisk and format like you normally do on a new drive before installing a fresh copy of Windows.The program will correct a number of problems(virus,surface,hd size reporting etc.) with the hard drive and let you resume using it like you did before. http://www.killdisk.com/ Good luck.

It may be easiest to replace the HD. I hate suggesting that as I sure there is a fix but I am not sure what direction to go in on this one. If not a new drive it may be time to back it up and format/clean isntall if it has been more than a year since the last time you've done it. I know alot of people say you never need to do that but, reinstalling every 12-18 months on a heavily used PC can make a world of difference. What AV are you using anyway?

Hi Mike I've been thinking along those lines also. Installing a second HD, tranferring data to it and then reinstalling Windows on the original drive is the path I'm leaning towards. It won't help me to discover how simply running a full ScanDisk caused this problem in the first place but should resolve it. BTW I'm running AVG free (after problems with NAV). Regards Stuart.