I would like to do a scandisk on my PC. I am told that it is better if I put PC in safe mode first.
How do I do that?

Restart your computer. Before you see the windows screen, press and hold either F5 or F8 ( I forgot which one) and select safe mode from the boot menu. You don't need to be in safemode to do a scak disk. Just make sure your screen saver is disabled, you have no programs running, and that basically your computer won't acess the hard drive to do anything other than for scandisk.

What Alibaba said above to start up in safe mode is right. The reason why one may recommend putting the computer in safe mode is because a typical systems has a lot of background processes running which may reset scan disk every few minutes.

Actually it depends on what version of windows you have. The facts are that SCANDISK may hang or stop if it tries to check a sector where a program is currently running or a file is in memory. So you want to close EVERYTHING before running SCANDISK. Opening in Safe Mode (you press F8 btw) loads the bare minimum so it more likely to not interfere. However, if you are running Win 9x (95, 98 or ME) its even better run from by booting to a command prompt. With 95 or 98, choose Restart in MS-DOS mode and type SCANDISK. For Win ME, you have to get the startup menu by pressing F8 and choosing Command Prompt.

When you start your computer bios will come from there keep pressing f8 then dos options will come there chose safemode and press enter and tats it

Depending on your operating system. I know under Windows 2000 and Windows XP, if you double click "My Computer", right click the drive you want to scan, click "Properties" at the bottom of the selection window, then, under the "Tools" tab select "Check Now" under "Error Checking". If you select one or both Check Disk options( Automatically fix file system errors and/or Scan for and attempt recovery of bad sectors) you will be provided with the option to run the scandisk the next time you restart your computer system. Select "Yes" and restart your computer. The scan will run at startup and you don't have to mess around with going into safe mode.

You also want to select these two options if running a disk scan anyway.

This post was started in 2003

this post was started in 2003Yeah, hope that scandisk operation isn't STILL running? :eek: