cant defrag cant scandisk. whats up with that

[nutz4drumz]

a friend of mine has me on his puter and he cant defrag or scandisk. hes got a p3 1gig with 256mg pc133 a 30gig hd/w 1 partition. he also has 2 scanners a cannon film scanner and a flatbed, has anyone run into this before?

[mahdi]

All the time with ME...I need to start the PC in Safe Mode and do it from there for it to finish...or
start with this...
<a href="http://support.microsoft.com/support/kb/articles/Q186/9/78.ASP?LN=EN-US&SD=gn&FR=0&qry=defrag&rnk=3&src=DHCS_MSPSS_gn_S RCH&SPR=WINME" target="_blank">"Drive's Contents Have Changed: Restarting..." Message When You Use the Disk Defragmenter Tool </a>
then
<a href="http://support.microsoft.com/support/kb/articles/Q222/4/69.ASP?LN=EN-US&SD=gn&FR=0&qry=scandisk&rnk=16&src=DHCS_MSPSS_g n_SRCH&SPR=WINME" target="_blank">MS knowledgebase about Scandisk</a>
<a href="http://support.microsoft.com/support/kb/articles/Q276/4/43.ASP?LN=EN-US&SD=gn&FR=0&qry=scandisk&rnk=31&src=DHCS_MSPSS_g n_SRCH&SPR=WINME" target="_blank">Computer Stops Responding When You Run a Thorough ScanDisk with McAfee VirusScan 5.1 Installed</a>

No wonder nobody likes ME

[Platypus]

Nortons System Works can cause this symptom if it is on or has been on the system. Some modification it makes upsets Defrag & Scandisk.

Likewise if the drive was partitioned with third party software to have smaller clusters than the FDISK defaults. Defrag & Scandisk can't allocate enough memory to handle the size of the FAT, & third party software has to be used for those functions as well.