hidden programs?

Hey everyone Im having a bit of a problem. I was recently getting a machiene ready to give to my little brother and sister to start learning on. Its an old win 98 box, not on the internet, nothing special about it. So i was cleaning off the hard drive and what not then ran scandsk I believe (what ever the program in 98 systools menu is) and an error kept comming up saying "this pregram as been interupted 10 or more times by a program writing to the drive, please terminate the prgrams and try again" or something close to that. So I go into the task amnager and close all non essential programs and try again, same problem. Any ideas on what could still be running that is causing this problem?

There are processes that run in the background, usually video drivers, multimedia, even antivirus, etc. When you run scan disk, it's best to run it in safe mode to avoid this problem.

The most likely culprit is windows itself. I get that message, even in safe mode on a machine with a 14Gb drive.

MsMittens is right about safe mode. With smaller drives it will probably get to finish before it is interrupted. All you have to do is tell it you don't want to see the message at the pop-up prompt and it will finish. It is a bit of a pain, because the job stops waiting for you to respond to the prompt :(

Cheers

Hello all

I have Had similar problems on one of my 98se boxes, and I generally have to disable The AVG Controll center, or after it is logged off ;Sygate and that usually lets the system go through the Program. The system has a 10 GB & a 12GB Drive.

Hope this helps

Cheers :cool:

or boot to dos instead of windows... that normally helps also.

thanks for all the replies, Im going back tomorrow and trying to finish the work, this machiene also has a small drive (10 gb) so Ill try in safe mode, and hopfully it will work this time. thanks again

or you can always press No to stop receiving that message

I'm not necessarily recommending this approach, but I kill all the processes that are running on the machine when I need to run system utilites. My machine is reasonably old, and has all sorts of stuff going on, which I just can't be bothered to remove properly.

It does work, as long as I don't kill the explorer process, but I do need to reboot once completed, to start everything up again. I did, early on, try to identify what was giving me these problems, and just kill the appropriate processes, but I never really nailed it down. So I kill everything, run a checkdisk and defrag, and then restart.

WARNING : Killing processes may result in problems. Make sure everything is stopped that can be first.

If you have to run scandisk in windows, then kill the background processes and turn-off the screensaver.