Scandisk and defrag enter endless loop

Go easy on the newb, I did search, I swear.

When I try to either defrag or run scandisk, one of my HDs seems to enter an endless loop.

scandisk: alternates between checking FAT and checking folders...doesn't stay in last nearly long enough, based on recovery from abnormal shutdown experience.

defrag: alternates between 0 and 1% complete while in initial "checking disk" stage.

Second disk does fine.

OS is 98SE.

Problem disk is 120G FAT32
OK disk is 4G FAT16 (legacy from previous system)

Both maxtor.

System was having "issues", but seems to be very stable now that I turned of the graphics acceleration stuff. As a result, I had to use reset button a lot. OS lives on the drive with issues, and system seems more stable than ever.

Guesses??

 

Did some more searches and came up with this thread:

http://forums.majorgeeks.com/showthread.php?t=18556&highlight=drive's+contents+changed

if that info doesn't help, I'll be back.

 

It was recently installed anti-malware. shut it down, and defrag works fine. Never mind. Of friggin course you can't defrag the HD when something is continually writing to it. Oh, good jog on the mods for moving this. I thought it was HW cause one HD defaged fine, and the other one not.