The problem appears to have been solved. Apparently installing the IDE cache update on the Windows Update site fixed it. Microsoft says that some Windows 98 computers will power off prematurely during shutdown, before data is finished writing to the drive from the IDE cache. Windows then wants to run ScanDisk on the next boot. The IDE cache update solves this problem.  This may explain why ScanDisk wanted to start with every boot, but I still don't know why Windows "thought" the drive(s) might have bad sectors.  I also don't know why ScanDisk would not start. BTW- ScanDisk runs fine from the DOS prompt. However, if ScanDisk would have started like it should have, it would have "told" Windows" that the drives were fine. Since it couldn't complete automatically at bootup, Windows continued to "think" it still needed to run.  So the cycle couldn't be broken.

Another mystery is why this problem occurred out of the blue when everything had been working without the IDE cache update before. After applying the update, I decided to defrag both drives.  Windows would not defrayment Drive D: because it said it had errors, but once again Scandisk found none. Maybe this final running of ScanDisk finally successfully communicated to Windows that the drive was indeed fine.  So, I'm still not absolutely sure what fixed the problem, the IDE cache update, or one more run of ScanDisk that finally "took".  I have changed msdos.sys back to automatically run Scandisk when Windows is not shut down properly. I've rebooted the computer several times and it boots into Windows with no error messages. So, it appears to have been fixed, but if the problem returns I'll try doing a Read/Write analysis of each drive.

Steve Smith


Steve Smith wrote:
>... every time it boots it displays the following message just as Windows starts up: "One or more of your disk drives may have developed bad sectors. Press any key to run ScanDisk with surface analysis on these drives." Pressing a key give this message: "There was an error running SCANDISK.EXE, or it was canceled. Run Scandisk for Windows, as you may still have errors on your disk(s)."...There are no bad sectors on the hard drives... 

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