I have XP Home, and run the Error Checking Utility (thru My Computer) every month as part of routine maintenance. I always check the box for "Scan and attempt recovery of bad sectors" as recommended in a PC Word article. Never had a problem.

It normally goes through 4 phases. Tried several times to run it yesterday. Right at the end of phase 2, it stops scanning and I get a message saying Error Checking Utility Cannot Complete. No error code or explanation.

This was just after Disk Clean Up and Spybot, so I did a System Restore to 1 day before. Still didn't help. (never had problem with these in past)

Any ideas how to fix?

Thanks...

See if there is any info in the event viewer (Control Panel > Administrative Tools).

Thanks Scleros.

After hours and hours of research and trying to change attibutes in cmd, etc, I solved the problem by just rebooting the PC. Unbelieveable!

Now you have me curious. What does the Event Viewer tell you? I looked at it, but can't really interpret the info.

Thanks...

Windows and other applications write info into the event log when something notable happens, usually something that wasn't supposed to happen but did anyway. The drive error checking process will write an entry into the event log when it is finished scanning with the results of the scan which it normally doesn't show. I thought there might be a similar entry in your situation with additional details regarding why the checker stopped.

Thanks