Gary- You could try running scandisk either from pure DOS mode or from Safemode. Also, you can run msconfig and use "selective startup" to kill everything that is listed on the Startup tab. Some startup items are called from the registry and don't necessarily show up on the task list. Hope this helps- Rick At 09:43 PM 7/26/2000 -0400, you wrote: >A friend has a HP 650 MHz Pentium III running Windows 98. When we try to run >ScanDisk, after it is left for a while, we get a message saying something is >writing to the hard drive and ScanDisk has restarted 10 times. It does not >complete. By using control-alt-del, I shut down everything running except >explorer and systray. I still got the same results, saying something was >writing to the harddrive. What could be writing to the hard drive? Any ideas >would be appreciated. > >TIA > >Gary South Do you want to signoff PCBUILD or just change to Digest mode - visit our web site: http://nospin.com/pc/pcbuild.html