ScanDisk cannot continue, drive is locked

[casperjrleo]

I get a message that says ScanDisk cannot continue because a program such as a disk utility has locked this drive. The same thing when I try Defrag. I turned the power off with out shuting down so it would scan on start up but it goes straight to windows. What can I do?

 

[lgebhart]

You don't mention which operating system you are using, but the following advice works very well with windows 98se.

Hold the control key down while booting, it should bring up the menu so you can get to the command prompt or safemode.

Good Luck! ggebhart@clover.net
I hope I never get too old or arrogant to learn something new!

 

[casperjrleo]

I tried your suggestion to no avail. I tried running scandisk in safe mode and something has it locked up. Defrag is the same. I'm running win 98. What should I do now?

 

[casperjrleo]

This might be of help for detecting the problem, of course it wasn’t a help for my stupidly. "During the process I did a control alt delete and tried to end a program during the defrag process.” I have taken off all virus scan programs.

 

[crisc]

Try booting to a command prompt and run scandisk from DOS. If that doesn't work use a Win98 boot disk and run it from the floppy.

 

[lgebhart]

Do you have Norton disklock on your machine or have you downloaded any shareware programs with that type of utility?

If it is your home computer, look in your programs list for any program with the name lock or disklock in it.

Check out the link below and see if you have any of these programs loaded. There are several hundred lock shareware programs listed here for keyboards to hard drives and maybe one of the names will look familiar to you that you have loaded on your computer. Make sure you put the whole two line URL in your internet browser.

http://www.totalshareware.com/asp/list_view.asp?catid=301&Page=4

If you find the program causing this disklock feature, there should be an unlock command in the options or preferences.

I hope this helps you. Let us know. ggebhart@clover.net
I hope I never get too old or arrogant to learn something new!

 

[lgebhart]

Sorry it was two lines when I was typing it in, but it is actually on one line here, so just click on the link and it should take you there.

There is one more thing you could do to see if you have Norton disklock.

START
SETTINGS
CONTROL PANEL
Double click on Add/Remove Programs

See if there is any reference to Norton or Symantec disklock or another disklock shareware program.

Again, let us know how you are coming. At this point I don't know if crisc's will work if the disk is locked, but if it is only locked in Windows 98 it might work, so you might want to try it from the command prompt or the Win98 startup floppy. ggebhart@clover.net
I hope I never get too old or arrogant to learn something new!

 

[Catadmin]

If you have something like Norton Desktop Utilities (or another third party program which does Desktop utility type stuff) make sure they are disabled first. If not, they could interfere with Scandisk's ability to completely run.

The other day, I had to run Scandisk from the DOS prompt, as others have previously suggested, because it had to keep "restarting" in Win95 just by virtue of the desktop and network client running in the background.

Try doing a "Restart in MSDOS mode" shutdown if you can't get the command prompt any other way. (I think 98 has that option, anyway).

Catadmin - New to Server Admin, but willing to learn... All help is appreciated.

 

[casperjrleo]

I tried the scan disk in dos it took about two hours fixing error after error on prompts and after finishing I went back to windows and it didn’t change anything. So I reformatted my hard drive and put all my programs back on. Fortunately I had just backed up all my data and was in a position to start fresh. It’s kind of a nice feeling to start fresh. So I’m ready to go. Thanks everyone for pitching in. I appreciate all the help and wish I had more time to keep trying, but I knew I could finish it this way with about four hours of work. Now I have to start catching up for the time that I was down.