Defrag blues

[capt waffoo]

Using Windows 98 & MS 97 Office Pro

When I try to defrag I get the "checking disk (sic) for errors" message, the hard drive chunters away all night and in the morning nothing has changed, a clear white screen, none of those little coloured blocks cascading downwards, amd a dismal progress bar showing "0% completed"

Ideas please?

[spannersatcx]

You must make sure nothing else is running in the background that would make a change to your C drive, i.e. Virus checker, or even scheduled maintenance. Close everything in the start up task bar, the one on the right, and then press ctrl + alt + del, shutdown everything except systray and explorer.

[fobotcso]

That's the answer. But at least my Win 98 had the decency to tell me the reason that it had had to restart 10 times because something was changing my C: drive while defrag was running. I did as Spanner says; it was almost certainly McAfee causing the problem. But the Hewlett Packard network "printer disovery" routine would also be a likely culprit. Defrag worked a treat with just Explorer and Systray running.

Incidentally, the purist would say that you should install new programs this way. Trouble is, no Office program seems to want to run in this configuration, so a re-boot is necessary to return the PC to normal.

I wish I knew why "rundll" shows up as running when I do a Ctrl/Alt/Del. I think it's the reason I'm getting a lot of freezes.

There's nothing in the Startup Folder or the Registry to show what starts it.

[capt waffoo]

Spanner man - thanks. You must have had the right idea - this problem has annoyed for ages. This time I cancelled all the icons you mentioned and lo; the dam thing worked. Thanks!