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Startup Tips

SKIP SCANDISK AFTER ABNORMAL SHUTDOWN

If you shut down your computer without going through the Shutdown sequence on the Start Menu, or a power failure turned off your computer, then a program called ScanDisk will run when you boot up following the abnormal shutdown of your computer. Once ScanDisk starts up, there is always an option for skipping a possibly time-consuming scan of your entire hard boot drive, but perhaps you would rather not run it at all. (The reason it's done is to check if there are any mis-allocated clusters on your hard drive that occurred when Windows did not properly close down.)

In order to do this, here's what you have to do: first, start an MS-DOS Prompt session by clicking on that icon on your Start Menu (or desktop, if you've saved a shortcut there for it.) Now type the DOS command for going to the root directory of your boot drive: "CD\". Next turn off the system, hidden, and read-only attributes of a file in the root directory called MSDOS.SYS; you do that by typing "ATTRIB MSDOS.SYS -S -H -R". Now you can edit this file, using the editor EDIT.EXE in your "WINDOWS\COMMAND" directory, or you can use NotePad if you prefer that text editor. Thus you would type in "EDIT MSDOS.SYS" or "START NOTEPAD MSDOS.SYS", depending upon your choice.

Once the file has been opened in your editor, find a line which contains the characters "[Options]" on it. This line is the header for the options section. There may be a line with "AutoScan=1" following that Options header. That specifies the default behavior of ScanDisk, which is to prompt you before running. In order to change the behavior to not run ScanDisk at all, change the value "1" to a "0". Or you can change the value to "2" if you want ScanDisk to not prompt before running, but to prompt before fixing any disk errors. Once you have saved the modified version of MSDOS.SYS to your root directory, be sure to change the file attributes back to their normal values by: "ATTRIB MSDOS.SYS +S +H +R".