damaged folders - scandisk&defrag problem

[Axel]

Hello all - at the parent's house for Thanksgiving and hit upon a problem. Successfully ran scandisk & defrag 3 days ago on this Dell XPS T450 windows 98 ( original edition ) PC.

Worked with a lot of image files over the last few days getting their USB camera and scanner to work. Deleted a bunch and thought I'd do another scandisk & defrag to clean things up -

no such luck.

Scandisk stays stuck on "checking folders" and defrag never gets past 0% because , most likely, of a damaged folder structure on the system.

Tried it in safe mode - rebooted several times - completed scandisk in dos mode and no problems on the surface scan in dos either......

Virus scanner runs - norton with latest definitions - doubt it's a virus.

Otherwise, the system is occasionally slow, but everything appears to run.....

I don't really want to restore the backup system and user.dat files if I can avoid it -

Does anyone have any other suggestions or utilities I might try?

Hard drive is huge and only about 30% full - no problems there.

On two of the defrag attempts - closed down everything in task manager beforehand - so I don't think it's a software conflict either....

Looking for ideas..... Dell support site was zero help - big surprise there.....:confused:

[Axel]

well - I looked through the mocrosoft knowledge base offerings and found nothing that describes my problem. The only thing close was that , on occasion, the systems can have trouble with removing long file names. Some of the stuff I wiped out did have long file names. I'm wondering if perhaps I damaged the fat table in that it couldn't correctly remove a long file name when I deleted it..... but I didn't find anything in the knowledge base dealing with that either. There is no mention of the scandisk or defrag utilities coming with windows 98 original stopping on checking folders. -

I shouldn't really say stopping or hanging as the job can be cancelled and life goes on, you get the perpetual hour glass.....

[Dudster]

I doubt it would help but I would try running System File Checker just incase :)