Hi Lenny,

This is usually caused by some background process writing to the disk while
your defrag or scandisk is running. They will sense that the disk contents
have changed and must restart the process because they can't be sure about
the state of the filesystem. It could be a virus scanner or similar process
running.

It is usually necessary to stop or exit all other programs when performing
a defrag and/or scandisk. You can press "CTRL-ALT-DEL" to see what programs
are running and kill them if it is not obvious how to stop everything.

In extreme cases where you are sure that you have killed all other running
programs and you still have a problem, you might try doing the defrag after
booting in safe mode, but this may run very slow because the disk drivers
may not be fully installed so disk access is slower than normal.

The Microsoft Knowledge Base may be helpful here too.
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=fh;EN-US;KBHOWTO

Russ Poffenberger
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>I'm using Windows 98 SE.  Suddenly, Scan Disk & Defrag are not
>working.  Scan Disk keeps on restarting 10 times with no result and Defrag
>will stay on for a half hour and never get beyond 0%.  This just started
>after years of trouble-free service.  Any ideas?  Thanks.
>
>Lenny Finkelstein

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