Scandisk very slow

[rja211077]

Scandisk (the DOS version) on my PC is incredibly slow. Although I've never actually timed it it must be 3-5 minutes. Every other Pc I've ever used gets through it in half a minute or so. I'm running Win98 with 475 Mhz processor and 128 MB RAM. 17 GB HDD but plenty free. It zooms up to 20-25% complete fairly quickly but then takes ages and ages to get to 30% and then is reasonably quick from then onwards. Any clues, anybody?

[mattie]

It is possible that the 5% that takes all the time is an area of the hard disk that will soon develop bad sectors, but is not quite there yet, which would explain why scandisk slows down at this point.

[moonacre]

I guess mattie's answer could be right but that's not a feature/symptom I've heard of. Might be worth doing a full scan with the surface scan option enabled just in case. Is your drive SMART enabled?. If so then there are more powerful diagnostics available. Could be more likely that you have some heavily fragmented files or have other processes running in the background. Scandisk is a pretty old 16 bit program which doesn't handle these problems too well. If you have checked for bad sectors, run a system files scan and defragmented and it is still slow then does it really matter ;-)