That Band-Aid was the fix that I was going to suggest. If you know that
there are no bad sectors on the drive, there's no reason to run scandisk
at startup. Somehow, your msdos.sys file got "stuck" (for lack of a
better word) with autoscan set to 1, rather than zero. Looks to me like
you already fixed it, before you asked the question!

If there is something that I've missed, it might be due to the drive
configuration.

   Tom


"Steven W. Smith" wrote:
>
> I'm working on an older Gateway P-75 that I upgraded to a 200MMX CPU, 64MB RAM and also added a Western Digital 4.6GB drive last year. I setup the WD drive as drive C: and made the original 850MB drive as drive D:. The computer is running Windows 98SE and it had been working fine but now 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). Press a key to continue loading Windows."
>
> There are no bad sectors on the hard drives. I've run Scandisk in DOS, Scandisk in Windows, SpinRite and Western Digital's "Drive Advisor" and PC Clinic and each of these programs give the hard drives a clean bill of health. I've run RegClean and re-installed Windows but this message still occurs with every boot(even in Safe Mode). Apparently Windows "thinks" there is a problem but Windows is mistaken. How can I fix this? Is there a registry entry somewhere that needs to be modified. For now, I've edited the msdos.sys file and changed the "autoscan" entry to "0" and this has solved the problem. But, this is really a band-aid and I'd like to know what is going on. Any ideas?
>
> Steve Smith
>
>             Do you want to signoff PCBUILD or just change to
>                     Digest mode - visit our web site:
>                    http://freepctech.com/pcbuild.shtml

              The NOSPIN Group is now offering Free PC Tech
                     support at our newest website:
                          http://freepctech.com