Strange disk problems

First of all, thanks to all who have helped me with the umb memory 
manager problem.  Now I am on to the next.  I have been tinkering with 
freedos for a couple of days now, trying to fix some mysterious disk 
problems, without too much success.  Here are some of the symptoms:

1)Scandisk can't even get started.  It just appears, does nothing, so I 
have to enter "Quit".

2)The defrag utitlity states that my disk C: is corrupted, then promptly 
quits.  But it works on floppies.

3)I have a program called CSAP which runs into all kinds of errors 
before it can accomplish it's job: sorting directories and directory 
entries.

4)I run norton disk doctor.  It says it cleans up lost chains and 
generally fixes everything.  It reports that some of my files have an 
incorrect time(I'm not sure how it determines this).  I skip this 
because I know this problem is a hold over from an earlier release of 
freedos.  I still have some files that were created when I had this 
earlier release, when there was a bug with the time stamps when you copy 
files(it changed the file creation time to the time you copied).

5)I run norton disk editor.  Here's where it gets interesting.  It has 
marked in red some of the files that appear to have problems.  First of 
all, it reports lost chains on drive C:, even after running norton disk 
doctor which was supposed to correct this problem.  It also reports the 
timestamp errors. It appears to mark in red the files or directories it 
finds problems with. Of the files marked in red, under the heading of 
"type" where it should say "file" or "dir", it should say "file" but 
there is instead "???".  Three files in the root directory appear this 
way.  They are all autoexec and bat files I created with the freedos 
editor.  I noticed with one of Norton's tools that there were remnants 
of older versions of the file I had deleted but not visible in the 
editor.  There is also one directory marked in red, for a reason I 
cannot ascertain.  It contains a (somewhat old)disk utility I downloaded 
that works fine.  Anyway, Norton disk editor gives plenty of information 
on directories, files, disks, partitions, sectors, and clusters, but not 
much an idea to fix anything.

Any ideas would be greatly appreciated !!!

George