Secrets of the Windows Masters: Forcing ScanDisk and Defrag to Finish Their Work

What do you do when the ScanDisk and Defrag utilities won't cooperate? It happens all too often. You start ScanDisk just fine, but after a few minutes you see this frustrating message: ScanDisk has restarted 10 times because Windows or another program has been writing to this drive. (See Figure 5.20.) It suggests that you close any other programs that are running—but you've tried that, and it doesn't do any good.

If you manage to make it through ScanDisk, Defrag can trip you up in an even more annoying way. As you watch the progress dialog box, you see that it stops before it hits 10%, and this message appears over and over: Drive's contents changed; restarting….