Cold snap in Florida. Formerly lived in Indiana - I feel for you all in the North.

I am running WIN98 (my mother's PC). When I try to run scandisk it tells me it can't fix errors in FAT. When I try to run defrag it says it is checking the disk for errors FOREVER! What can I do to fix the errors and run defrag?

Happy Holidays,
BSAC

it does not sound good...
personally i would boot the machine to dos (pressing F8 while the
machine is booting, after the manufactorer's logo comes up and before
the windows 98 load screen comes up, selecting "ms-dos") then you
should be able to run scandisk and allow it to scan the whole harddrive...

the reason why it does not sound good... the FAT (File Allocation Table)
is where the operating system keeps a "paper trail" of where the files
are at on the harddrive... and if it loses this those files are gone.
hopefully it is just pointing towards some temp files and nothing vital.

you might have to have a few floppies on hand so that you can copy
her word documents off the machine and re-format the harddrive
if the damage is pretty extensive. of course it could be so bad that
the harddrive is just toast.

hope this helps some!!

--rex

Ok my 98 wont run defrag neither. There are a few defrag programs to fix this but they do cost some $.

But to run defrag you must go into safe mode when this happenes. It always works for me. Try your scandisk there too.

Hit f8 while booting then safe mode.

Hope this helps ya!
CGM3

How about another way ?

You can d/l the needed bootdisk and start the computer with the floppy in the drive. Just make sure that you get the one that you need.

All Windows bootdisks

This is a great Defrag program and it is free.

Diskeeper Lite.

Yeah thats the one I wanted to say! Diskkeeper its the one you want!

As soon as I get the opportunity I will try some of these. Thanks to all for the suggestions!