Scan disk won't run

At my wits end here, co worker has WIN ME, can't get a scan disk to run. Not from DOS and not from windows. Checked virus scans, online and offline. Checked for trojans, online and offline. He's shut down all his programs so nothing is running but scan disk.

Scan disk starts but hangs as if there were other programs restarting it, but he has everything written down. He is ready to format he is so frustrated.

We both have searched google and found nothing but what we have already done. Can't think of another thing.

Any ideas?

start the computer in safe mode then run scan disk.

If it still won't run in safe mode it sounds like your hard drive might have some serious problems. I'd try the manufacturers diagnostics.

I have a friend who had a similar problem with WIN98.
He couldn't run scandisk, and had other mysterious problems.
"Someone" told him it was a bad hard drive, so he bought
two new ones.

I helped him install the drives and reinstall his operating system
and he was happy. I took his old hard drive home, installed it in my
machine, formatted it and there was nothing wrong with it.

I think he had a bad system file or library(DLL), or maybe his scandisk
was corrupted, or even a virus.

My suggestion is to make a bootable floppy disk from another
computer, WINme or WIN98, with scandisk on it. Set the write protect
tab on the disk (just in case), boot from it and run scandisk.

I'd be very surprised if it refused to run under those circumstances.
If it still refused, I'd suspect memory, but the hard drive or controller
could have an unusual problem.
:cool:

Thanks everyone! As usual I knew I could count on all of you. :D

It looks like you have resolved the issue -but if you have not you might want to boot in DOS mode and try chkdsk /f run it several times and then try scandisk again. This would work on w95 but I do not know about me.

Cheers,
-D