Exclusive access needed

I hope that someone can help me. Here is my problem,,, All of a sudden, I cannot run any programs that require exclusive access to my hard drive such as scandsk, chkdsk, Nortin Disk Dr., ext to maintain or fix my HD. All of these programs ask you to reboot to perform their functions. Upon the reboot, I get a message that says, "... cannot obtain exclusive access to the hard drive."

Obviously, something is loading on bootup even before these programs engage. My question is how can I find out what it is; or is their something else that can be causing this situation?

I have a Compaq 2120us with a 40mb Seagate Hard Drive.

Thanks!
Ron

 

O.K. Here is the exact wording of the message.....

"... cannot open the volume for direct access."

 

Try

http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=823439

or

http://www.sysinternals.com/Forum/forum_posts.asp?TID=4296&PN=1

 

Justplayn,

Thank you! One of the links that you referenced me to suggested that Spyware Doctor might have been the culprit. It was. I uninstalled Spyware Dr. and now it works perfectly!

From now on, I'll stick with Norton.

Much thanks again!