Strange HD activity in WinME

[Topha]

I just installed win me on a pc, and everything works fine except that when i run scandisk it took more 10 hours because it always restarted the program. same with defrag, it always said the contents of the drive have changed, restarting.
the problem is: i didnt have any other programs running in the background.
anyone know what the problem might be?

k6-3 400mhz, 128megs ram, 6,2gig hd, winME.

[cjolley]

It's trying to defrag your swap file.
It is also using memory on your swap file.
So, it is deadlocked.
Try disabling virtual memory, running defrag & then turning virtual memory back on.
chuck

[Topha]

didnt work, still restarting about 5 times in 25 secs
another thing: everytime it enters windows it seems to scan the floppy disk, i already unchecked the scan for floppy disks button, still does it.
i installed the latest hd controller drivers, problem occured before and after.

btw: i deactivated system restore, anyone know how i can delete the folder without having to make a bootdisk under win98? its 65 megs although i deactivated it real quick

[az]

maybe try it in erm... umm... "abgesicherter modus"

AZ

[cjolley]

This happens in scandisk not just defrag?
hmmm.......
Try scanning your disk from dos.
Maybe you have some unusual error on your disk.
chuck

[Topha]

az: i think its safe mode
i tried it and defrag worked much better, not quite sure whether it works in standard mode. gave up for today, there is only so much time i can spent in front of a computer.
cjolley: winme doesnt have dos-mode
ill try it though, maybe i can get it by booting from cd, maybe i can even start scandisk from the me bootdisk, ill check it all tomorrow.
thanks to everyone who posted in this thread so far

[Kosh Naranek]

Try installing cacheman to reduce overall memory usage ... disk cache usage ... thus giving you more free memory and scandisk / defrag a better chance of completing.
cacheman .. www.outertech.com
A note on defrag ... can sometimes take 4ever to complete even og very highend systems, it all depends on the level of fragmentation.So if you have just deleted the old windoze and installed win me without doing a reformat then the HDD could be very framented.The size of the partition you are trying to defrag also means a lot to the time it takes to complete a defragmentation .. the larger it is the longer it takes, espacially if the drive is almost full.
If the drive is almost full, freeing up some diskspace might give a huge reduction in defrag time.

[This message has been edited by Kosh Naranek (edited 02 April 2001).]

[spoogenet]

A friend of mine had this problem. I don't exactly remember what was done to fix it, but make sure anything that would access the drive is turned off.

I'm not sure whether the indexing service was his problem or not, but I would check into that if I were you (I think ME has the indexing service, right?).

I'll try to find out more info on his problem in the mean time....

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[Jorden]

It might be WinME's System Restore function that's playing havoc. The Restore function is making a snapshot of your PC's condition every 10 hours at least (might be less in your case). It writes down the status of all exe, dll and whatnot files to harddrive and compresses it into a CAB file there. (You'll find it in the hidden _Restore\Temp folder)

Ofcourse, writing to harddisk interrupts scandisk and defrag, restarting it again.

You can disable SR by going Start->Control Panel->System->Performance->File System->Troubleshooting. Check the Disable System Restore box there.

Jord.

[kewlcat]

The reason both scandisk and defrag restart is that disk contents change. Usually there is a background process running that causes this (virus checkers cause this all the time). So kill all programs in task manager except Systray and Explorer and run both programs, or if you really want to find the problem, kill one at a time and then try.

As for defrag taking a long time, if you are looking at the detail mode, you should be able to see exactly what its doing -- whether it is just doing a lot of stuff, or restarting every few minutes.

HTH,
Rahul

[Topha]

i deactivated system restore as soon as i could, no other programs were running, no clue what indexing is, you got the german term for it? if its the automatic update, its deactivated as well. i have no virus checkers or anything similar installed, and i closed all programs down before running scandisk.
i dont wanna reinstall winme again, so if anyone got anymore tips, i would really appreciate it.

[Jorden]

Okay, then a question: Did you format the drive before you put WinME on it, or did you update an existing Win98?

If the latter, did you scandisk and defrag before updating?

If you formatted the drive and installed WinME on it, did you use standard installation, or manual? Did you set the swapfile yourself? Is the whole 6.2Gb drive the WinME drive, or do you have dualboot or something similar? Is WinME the only program on the drive? etc.

Jord.

[cjolley]

Topha,
Doesn't ME allow creation of a startup disk?
Create one.
Start to command prompt wthout CD Rom support & start scandisk.

Or create a bootable disk with only:
1, himem.sys from your \windows\ directory
2, command.com and scandisk.exe from your \windows\command\ directory
(There is no command prompt based defrag though)

Or borrow a copy of Norton Utilities.
chuck

PS I had to go back to Win98 the day after I installed ME because the Oracle 8i database client software, which I use for work, will not install or run on ME!

[Topha]

Jorden: i formatted the hard disk, didnt do any partitions, so the whole HD is C:. should i've split it? i did manual installation, i set the swap file myself, but by now i tried both deactivating the swap file and letting windows manage it. index is deactivated, as are all the other unnecessary startup menu entries.
i activated/deactivated DMA for the hard drive, didnt notice any difference.
argh.
would win2k run too slow on the system?

[spoogenet]

Please bear with me, it's been a while since I've used ME, and even longer since I've used 98, so my memory on them isn't exactly great.

I know Win2k has built-in indexing of the contents of drives. Right-click on the drive letter and it gives you a checkbox to allow indexing of that drive. I'm not sure that ME has it. I'm equally unsure that it was involved with my friend's problems. I'm tyring to get a response from him about his Defrag issue....

Here's something from the MS KB. Not sure that the URL will work, though.

MSKB Article

Article ID is Q186978

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