Scan disk in XP

Well a friend of mine started to scan disk Saturday and as of today 3/13/07 it is still not finished. I told him that I'd post something to see if I could get it figured out so here it is. Limited info for you though as he has norton antivirus and he thinks it has a 250gig hard drive running windows XP pro. Thats all I know so if I need more input here let me know.

 

what about free disk space on the drive, and how did your friend start the defrag, i mean in safe mode or in normal?
So if the drive is almost full and the defrag process is running in normal mode, it can be alright, i remeber when i tried to defrag 20gb partition of my 40Gb drive, and this process took about 5 or 6 hours, because there were lot's of programs runing simultaneously.

for more information read this and this

 

Scan disk is not part of Windows XP, nor will it work on XP drives unless they are FAT, which a 250GB drive will not be.

I assume you mean Check Disk and or Defrag, not a commercial or manufacturers disk scanner.

Both Check Disk and Defrag require exclusive access to the hard drive and will not work if other programs ( such as screen saver or antivirus)are reading from or writing to it. imagine trying to paint a wall whilst a gang of louts are also spray painting it!

Check Disk can usually be run successfully from safemode or from the command prompt safemode. defrag has an option to run before anything else on next boot.

A tip before doing these checks, delete all internet caches, recycle bin stuff, temp files etc. It doesn't pay to move dead weight around.

If the reason for running the scan is concern over a possible faulty drive, post the manufacturers details and we can point you at their own scanner.

Final thought Windows XP without SP2 and some bios will not recognise disks above 137GB. Make sure they are up to date.

Studio T

 

Thanks for the input here. I will find out more info and post at a later time. (I know, I shudda done this first, but I can at least tell my friend what he needs to do so it can be figured out)