RunOnce - Run Scandisk and Defrag without restarts



You've had the problem time and time again - You want to defragment or scandisk your hard drive in Windows 95 or 98, but it keeps restarting because something is still using it. There is a useful way to get around this without resorting to Safe Mode.

Below this paragraph are two links, one to a Run Defragmenter.reg and another to a Run Scandisk.reg. What do these files do? Running one of them will tell the computer to defragment or scandisk the next time it boots. The advantage of doing this is it will run before anything else does (to the best of my knowledge).

Defragmenter Registry file
Scandisk Registry file

The next time you want to run Scandisk or Defragmenter, double-click one of these files and reboot. It will run the program before running anything else, meaning it must complete or you must cancel it before the rest of Windows (explorer.exe for example) will load.

For those of you wanting to know what keys it modifies before downloading (How can I blame you?), it modifies the HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\RunOnce key by creating a new String named "Scandisk" or "Defragmenter" with the command-line being the value.

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