Diagnostic Tools Freeze

[thud105g]

Not Sure This The Right Forum but..

I am running Windows 98 PIII 1Ghz 512Mb

C:13Gb 8Gb free
D:40Gb 14Gb free

I run Norton Utilties System Check regularly. About a week ago it froze hard and I had to powerdown, it always freezes at the same point:

MS DOS Program Shortcut Scan C: has no label

I can reproduce this with painful regularity
The same situation occurs when I attempt to run MS Disk Cleanup, it freezes at the start before it does anything Some of my non diagnostic programs are freezing at startup. One freezes at the point were you are to OK the boiler plate
license agreement.

MS products like Word, Excel, IE work fine, other utilities like Ad-aware and Spybot work fine. Yahoo mail works and I can download files across the net

I have no idea if this is hardware or software problem or if this is right forum. I would appreciate a starting point where to look.

 

[Jump1ng]

Have you checked your hard drive for faults? Try and run checkdisk or even better download a tool from the makers of your drive and create a diagnostic disk. This will boot from a floppy and let you run a thorough test on the hard drive to check it for errors.

Since you said that other programs that run check on the drive it's sounds very likely that the drive is starting to develop faults.

If you catch them early enough you can usually use norton ghost to ghost the drive to a new one and save you re-installtion time.

If you don't know the make of your drive I think the seagate tool have a generic test which will test any make of drive.

 

[thud105g]

I ran checkdisk, I ran Norton System Check(disk problems only) and I defragged the disk, no problems. I still freeze when I attempt the other actions.

 

[Jump1ng]

Maybe your norton system check program has been corrupted, try to reinstall it or if norton got a repair function try to repair the program.

Or if you can find another system check tool see if it runs through ok or if it freezes in the same spot.

I still would run the right disk tool from the makers of the drive as they are more thorough than the tools running under windows.