This almost certainly means another program is running, not an imminent
drive failure.
Are there any icons in the system tray?
Compaqs have a lot of proprietary junk running in the background.
Use Run/Msconfig to shut down startup programs, turn off the screensaver.
The best way might be to run scandisk in safe mode.
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I have a friend who has a 3 month old Compaq. It is a 850 MHz Duron, 128 MB
  RAM, running Windows Me. When trying to run scandisk ......
  "Scandisk has restarted 10 times.

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