Hard Drive Locked?

[traveler]

I have a problem with a PC that I cant figure out. I was running a little routine maintanance on the machine(P100, Win95, 32 megs RAM) using Nuts & Bolts and in the middle of the defrag process the system locked up on me. I had to ctrl-alt-delete to get out of it and that produced a blue screen letting me know the system was busy, blah blah...but now when I reboot it will only let me boot into safe mode, and running scandisk turns up the response that a disk utility has locked the drive, and that I should close the program or wait for it to end. I have no clue as to what may have 'locked' it, or how to even go about 'unlocking' it. I really need help on this one, so any suggestions are extremely welcomed.

[traveler]

I posted this same problem in the General section, guess I should have posted it here instead. Oh well, here goes again. I have a problem with a PC that I cant figure out. I was running a little routine maintanance on the machine(P100, Win95, 32 megs RAM) using Nuts & Bolts and in the middle of the defrag process the system locked up on me. I had to ctrl-alt-delete to get out of it and that produced a blue screen letting me know the system was busy, blah blah...but now when I reboot it will only let me boot into safe mode, and running scandisk turns up the response that a disk utility has locked the drive,and that I should close the program or wait for it to end. I have no clue as to what may have 'locked' it, or how to even go about 'unlocking' it. I really need help on this one, so any suggestions are extremely welcomed.

[GoldbergFan]

This dosen't happen much but the only way I have found to fix this is to reinstall windows again.

Eric Vanderveer

[traveler]

Well, I tried to reinstall windows, but I get the same error because it refuses to run scandisk...it tells me there is either a compression problem or a disk-cache utility is running. Well, the drive is not compressed and I cant find anything like a disk-cache utility. I hate to reinstall windows by bypassing the scan for fear of serious reprecussions, and I really dont want to format the drive. Can anyone else out there save me?

[grud]

Try booting into a DOS prompt (press F8 on bootup to get menu)type in LOCK at the command prompt.
You wil lbe asked if you are sure you want to do this.
Answer OK.
Restart the machine.

If it fails try running scandisk at the DOS prompt. Type SCANDISK /AUTOFIX /SURFACE for fastest running time.

If this fails you may have a damaged Master Boot Record.
Run a DOS based backup utility to backup any data files you really need.
Then at the DOS prompt type in FDISK /MBR
This will rewrite your Master Boot Record, it will either kill or cure your disk problems, so be warned!
Restart the machine.
If it is dead then you will need to boot from a bootable system disk and repartition & reformat the drive.
Good luck!

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idunno

[Zorrander]

Sounds like your only hope is going to be a format. Since it will get into safe mode, back up some of the stuff you can't reinstall (downloads, etc) and give it the format c: cure. Windows gets clunky after a while anyway so I'm sure you'll be happy. http://www.hardwarecentral.com/discussion/smile.gif