Scan disk woes

[Trouble]

Hi Guys,
Need some help with scandisk.Everytime the PC boots I get an incorrect shutdown message and scandisk wants so run a thorough test.Have ran the test overnight and it came back with no errrors.Next time I boot up I get the same message again.
The HDD it wants to scan is always my E drive which is mounted in a removable tray and contains nothing but files.OS is ME so please no derogatory comments about that :P ......

cheers Trouble......

[John Prophet]

How long has it been doing that?

You could do "disable scandisk after bad shutdown"..but that might just mask a problem and make it worse. Thats uber "msconfig" / "advanced"

[Trouble]

Thanks John,
Its been doing it for a few days now.I agree with you I would rather not disable it but instead fix it.

Don't know if it could be related or not but I have tried to disable a couple of startup items through MSConfig (MS Office and exif launcher)but on reboot they both reappear.

cheers.........

[Gettinbye]

Have you installed windows updates? If your box shuts down too fast (before everything necessary is written to HDD from memory) you'll get improper shutdown errors. There's an update to delay shutdown by 2 seconds to give that write a chance to complete.

As far as your E: drive being checked by scandisk...you said you just had files located there? If you've installed anything from that drive, it's possible you have file dependencies with the necessary files being located on E:, which would explain why scandisk would need to check it...

Just my $.02

[Trouble]

No Haven't installed that update and have been using the OS this way since forever.Last ReFormat about 12 months ago.
There are no file dependencies located in "E". Just used as a backup for all my stuff.
The problem is almost definately coming from "C" but where to start looking?

cheers..........

[Trouble]

^^^^Bump^^^^
Sorry Guys any takers?

[DoctorReno]

How do you have scandisk options and advanced configured?
Personally, I untick the automatically fix errors box so I can see exactly what the errors are and then I can determine the best way to correct them.... I don't always trust MS to make the best decisions automatically. Get back to us with what some of the errors it finds are and that may help us find the cause. I also untic the setting to do write testing.... It dramatically speeds up a thorough test. In my experience write testing is an unnecessary redundancy... if there is a problem it'll likely catch it by just doing the read test.
Let me know how you have the rest of the options set and I can then recommend what you might better set them as.

One other thing you might try is starting the computer is safe mode and running scandisk from safe mode.

As far as the patch it can be accomplished by disabling the Fast ShutDown feature... that is exactly what the patch does. I have a sneaking suspision that Gettinbye is on the right track. 98 and ME are notorious for working fine and then for no good reason getting fussy about uninitializing drivers and causing problems like you describe.

And as far as ME.... it takes a little tweaking but my experience is that I could make it run reliably and I like it. IMO ME got a bad rap because of it's release at basically the same time as 2k and MS didn't suport it like they should and left it as a orphaned child.

Let us know what happens
Good luck.... be patient and the members here will resolve your problem.

[Trouble]

Thanks Doc,
Scandisk was configured by default so I took your advice and configured it the way that you have suggested ie: do not perform write testing and do not repair.
Ran the scan again starting with "C".It found problems but unfortunately still repaired them.I then reset the configuration as above.
On reboot the problem has resolved.

Just my 2cents about ME.I find it to be the best(for me anyway),have tried them all.It has always been solid for me,like you said after a few tweaks.

Cheers Trouble

[foodbiz]

I had the same problem, I tired for 2 days to fix it! Finnaly gave up and upgraded to winXP and now no problems

[DoctorReno]

Great to hear that things are working. I'm not clear exactly, are you saying that the first time you set it to not automatically fix errors that it didn't stop on each errror and let you see what the error was and give you options to correct of ignore and continue?

I'd have to say that you accidentally left the check mark (tic) and it automatically did repairs.

Like I said, I want to see what the problems are because I don't totally trust scandisk to do what I want and I want to know if it's a minor or major problem so I do not want it to do automatic fixes.

IMO you do not need to run it in thorough mode more than about once a month. It's far to time consuming and unnecessary.

I have machines setup with 98SE, ME, 2K and XP Pro. All have pros and cons and ALL need tweaking to run "better". For most of my work I use my XP machine but on occasion I use the others for specific tasks.