Scandisk Part One                         Back to the previous page 

Wednesday, April 24, 2001

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Hello to All!  Well, I've had to change the date, again.  I started this April 18th, and I'm going to finish it on the 24th.  And such is life...

By the way, I've been meaning to tell you all that I passed my A+ Certification in January!  I'm now a card-carryin' techie!  :) :)

Today we are going to tackle two very under-rated utilities called Scandisk and Defrag.  As far as I am concerned, they are the custodians of your computer, they keep your computer cleaned up.  They can also let you know if your hard drive is failing, or even repair some small problems on your hard drive. 

Here's the thing...you all have Scandisk and Disk Defragmenter (Defrag) on your computer because it comes with your operating system: Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows 98 SE, and Millennium, Windows NT, and Windows 2000.  Scandisk and Defrag have been around since the early days of Dos, and sometimes I still use that version of scandisk; I'll tell you more about that later in the newsletter.  In fact, we are going to cover three different ways to run Scandisk, and three different ways to run Defrag in this edition of the Rocky Report.

Reasons to run Scandisk:

1. To keep a check on your hard drive to make sure that you don't have any bad sectors popping up.

2.  To repair little errors that can arise with improper shutdowns due to those little glitches like "illegal Operations", blue screens, and freezing up for no good reason :), cross linked files and lost clusters. 

3.  To improve the response time of your computer, and the resources that can run low and make your computer run like a slow boat to China.

4.  The technical reasons are that Scandisk fixes hard drives, floppy disks, Ram drives, and memory cards.  Mainly used for hard drive and floppy disk errors and fixes:

file allocation table
file system structure
directory tree structure
physical surface
compressed volumes
long file names.

(Whew! Now aren't you glad I just gave you the first 3 reasons that are easier to understand)

And, I HAVE actually fixed a floppy disk or two with scandisk, as well.

Reasons to run Defrag:

1. To put all the files for each program all together, and that improves the response time for your programs to launch.

2.  To dramatically improve the response time of your entire hard drive, and thus, bringing a smile to your face.

How often should you run Scandisk:

1.  As often as you like, everyday is okay.

2.  At least run scandisk once a week to insure that your hard drive is in good working order.

How often should you run Defrag:

1.  As with Scandisk, you can run defrag everyday, and it will dramatically improve your computer's performance.  I learned this recently using a wonderful program that will defrag your computer in about 10 minutes called:  DISKEEPER.  I didn't realize that you could run defrag everyday and that really makes a difference until I tried this program. Download your free 30 day trial at:

 http://diskeeper.com/trialware/trialware.asp

I highly recommend it!  You'll be amazed at the boost your computer receives after using this program on a daily basis.  

2.  Run at least once a week, for sure. 

Steps to run Scandisk in Windows: 

There are several different ways to get to and start Scandisk.  I'm going to give you two of the ways:

1. Click on Start, click on Run, and type Scandisk, and click OK.  This is the shortest cut I know!

2.  Or click on Start, Click on Programs, Accessories, System tools, and click on Scandisk in that menu.

Both will get you there, and then you can run the Standard or Thorough version of Scandisk.  Standard checks the files and folders only (your programs), and runs in a shorter amount of time, but is very effective.  Thorough check files folder, and the disk surface.  You should run this version at least once a month or more.

If you have a screensaver set to run, disable it  temporarily.  Right-click in the middle of your desktop, click on Properties, and then in the  display box click on screensaver and scroll in the box to NONE, and click on it, click apply (at the bottom), and OK.  Also disable your Anti-virus program, with Norton, find the icon on the taskbar, right-click on it and click on DISABLE.  You can enable it again the same way, or restart your computer and it will automatically enable.  These two things interrupt the Scandisk and it will restart a lot.  Also if you get the message that scandisk has "restarted 10X, do you want to keep getting this message?", click NO.  This will allow the scandisk to finish. 

What to do if your Scandisk will not finish:

Sometimes you get a message that says something about "other programs writing to the disk, close programs"; this is the message that results when more than just your anti-virus software is running and interrupting the scandisk procedure.  At this stage, I usually do one of two things:  run scandisk in Dos or run scandisk in safe mode.

Scandisk in Dos

Yes, this is the old standby scandisk that many of you used to run in Dos when you had Windows 3.1.  The OLD DAYS, remember?  I do. 

Here are the instructions.  By the way, this doesn't work for the Millennium users, and I'm not sure about Windows 2000 (I'll have to check on that).

1.  Click on start, shut down, and restart in MS-DOS mode.
2.  Now type CD\. and then press Enter on the keyboard.
3.  You will be at the dos prompt now:  C:\
4.  Type SCANDISK, and press Enter.
5.  This will start the process, and when it gets all the way through the numbers, and asked if you want to do the full surface scan, choose yes with your arrow keys, and press Enter on the keyboard.  This will take a while, hours for most. Best to run this at night so it doesn't interfere with your daily computing.  Just turn off the monitor, and walk away.  In the morning, you can read the results, and then exit the program, and when you see your dos prompt again, C:\, then turn off your computer, and restart it.  If you have the time, now would be a great time to run Defrag.  It will zoom through in a few minutes, or a couple hours depending on your system.

Running Scandisk in Safe Mode is necessary sometimes, and restarting your computer in safe mode loads the least programs and the least interference on your computer. 

Steps to restart your computer in safe mode:

1.  If your computer on and at the desktop, you click on Start, Shutdown, restart.  After the first screen appears, you click on F8 at the top of your keyboard and hold down the key.  Your may hear some noise, but just keep holding F8  down until you see a screen that shows 4 or 5 choices to start  your computer in.  Type the number on the keyboard that corresponds with Safe Mode, usually #3, and then press Enter on the keyboard.

2.  Your computer will appear muted and gray, and this is normal. A screen will pop up that tells you that you are in Safe mode, click OK with your mouse.  You will reach the desktop after that.

3.  Then just click on Start, Programs, Accessories, system tools, and scandisk.  Click on the Thorough or Standard (at this stage, I would choose thorough) and click on automatically fix errors, and then START .  Scandisk will work hear 99% of the time, as long as you don't have some hard drive problems.

4.  When it's finished, restart your computer, as usual (start, shutdown restart).  I would now run the standard scandisk which shouldn't take too long, and then defrag.

These difficulties with scandisk usually come up if you haven't run scandisk for a while, and your computer is really in need of it.  It will smooth out if you just run it on a regular basis. 

Some people asked me this after I sent the others, so I'm sending it along with all the Scandisk instructions.  Scandisk settings (advanced button) are set to what they should be at the default (settings that are set according to windows), should have a dot by these settings:

Display Summary: Always
Log file: replace Log
Cross linked Files: Make copies
Lost file fragments: convert to files
Check files for:  invalid file names 
Check Host drive first

You are mainly looking for 0 bytes in bad sectors, and that will be in the
display summary.

Let me get back with you on Defrag tomorrow.  It won't take so much time.  You've probably noticed it in the System tools already.  This will give you some work to do, and I'll get the Part 2 done tomorrow, I promise.

Hope you all are finding this information valuable.  I know that some of you are already familiar with scandisk and defrag, but maybe I have touched on some new tricks for you, too.  I feel like these instructions ought to be branded into the computer so that they are not so overlooked.  This is my way of spreading the news!! 

I appreciate all of you.  Remember that I will have all  these monthly issues of my newsletter available at my websites, along with other information:

http://www.rockyreport.com

And

http://www.internetguideandmore.com

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