Been awhile since I've been to these boards. But I'm back.

I bought a HP Laptop a little over a year ago, it came equipped with Windows Vista Home Premium.
I actually like Vista, I even have the upgrade to Ultimate which I'll be installing today.

But lately I've been having a strange problem.
Everytime I schedule a Scandisk (Checkdisk), and reboot the computer, the test runs to about 3-5 percent then halts...

I have turn it off via hard boot and then skip the scandisk to get back to windows (skipping the scandisk doesn't always work either, sometimes it won't recognize my 'press any key' option and continues to run the scandisk and freeze, despite my wanting to cancel.

Before all this, Vista was automatically recommending a scan disk on bootup because of a 'Volume Consistency Error', but same thing, it would freeze. I got it to stop checking for Volume Consistency by pressing F8 on bootup and doing a repair on it...the repair DID find and fix some critical bootup errors, which stopped the consistency check... I'm only getting stuck when I schedule my own scandisk now.

Anyway, just wondered if anyone knew what this was all about. In my case the situation is hopefully moot, because as I type this, I'm preparing the laptop for system recovery then update to Ultimate. Gonna start over with it.

Thx

Have you run any real diagnostics on the drive? Like the HD manufacturers HD diagnostics or the laptop manufacturer's HD diagnostics?

Sometimes you have to run CheckDisk from Safe mode as win often gets in its own way for low-level functions like that. There is also a way to set up CheckDisk to run during boot rather than in Safe mode which runs before a lot of Win is loaded up, but I've forgotten how to do that. As suggested above, use your drive mfr's diagnostic disk to scan for hardware errors as that boots separately so Win can't get in the way. There are also third party scanDisk type programs that boot separately so win won't get in the way.
Perhaps the best disk hardware checker is SpinRite, but it can take forever on a deep level on today's huge drives. It's lowest level of testing approximates the mfr's integrity check. But S-R isn't cheap and I don't think it checks for file structure integrity like scanDisk or checkDisk does. So you'll need another program to do that as well. http://www.majorgeeks.com is where I go to find free diagnostic tools.

.bh.