Another HDD Activity Monitor

[PBrennick]

Thanx Michael, I guess I should feel stupid about that question.  Just wasn't thinking.  BTW:  I like these HDD monitors a lot, easier than looking on the floor at the tower, or trying too!

Paul

[Mark Jones]

I agree! HDDMon had alerted me to the fact that something is writing to my disk at least twice a second, still unsure exactly what's doing it but I never would have seen it without HDDMon!

Back in the days of Windows 3.1, there was a great utility that loaded as a DOS TSR and displayed a text overlay in the top-right corner of the screen. It used black text on red and green colored text backgounds and looked something like this: 00: 01:, indicating which physical disk was being accessed and wether it was being written to or read from. Slick! I loved that thing.

Any chance HDDMon could see a GUI overlay option like this? That would be really nice. Might be able to utilize faster refresh rates too.

[Phoenix]

Thank you all for your help and feedback. In fact, i am looking for different ways to show extended information about disk access in the taskbar notification area by another iconwidth for example (this led me to privilege management which should probably not be posted) or something on the desktop that does not take too much place. And yes, customizing of timersettings or similar should be done (and allow to choose one of the seven iconsets i'm testing right now on W2K and XP  )

Regads Phoenix

[Ghirai]

Very weird, after i left it running for some time, it stopped working (showing NO activity at all), while i was searching for files, arhiving, etc.
The Motherboard LED was showing activity.

Restarting the app didn't help...

Any ideas?

I'm running XP Pro SP2, AMD Athlon 64 3000+, 2 GB RAM, and a 300 GB Maxtor.

[Phoenix]

Ghirai,

i have no idea. Did the tooltip show information about the number of drives detected? It should report at least "1 drive detected" for your Maxtor.

[Ghirai]

Yes it did.

Even after restarting the box it wouldn't want to work.

I remember downloading your app some time ago, tested, and it didn't work.
I forgot about it, and downloaded again 2-3 days after that, when it seemend to work fine.

[Mark Jones]

Is the drive an external, USB, firewire, removable or something? Does it standby/powerdown from a BIOS inactivity timer? Maybe PDH.DLL crashed and burned? (no that couldn't be...)

[Phoenix]

Ghirai,

i have still no idea what happens...

Mark,

HddMon should work perfect with at least USB-Devices, i have tested it over and over again (on W2K SP4 and XP pro SP2). Unfortunately there is no chance for me to test it with firewire storage devices. BTW, HddMon does not use pdh.dll but DeviceIoControl from kernel32.dll.

If the device-number shown in the tooltip is > 0, and there is no activity shown... possibly a problem with displaying the icon.. i can't find anything going wrong. I did an 1.8-gig backup with 7z and resulting heavy disk activity today at office, no problem.

Anybody else with a similar problem?

Regard, Phoenix.

[Ghirai]

Forgot to say, the HD is a standard IDE HD, nothing special.

It still doesn't work, and it doesn't work an my laptop anymore, but it does work at the computers at work (also an IDE HD).

It's a shame, couse i really like the app, and i added it to startup, but nothing...

[Phoenix]

The attached file contains HddMon with an error report via Console for Shell_NotifyIcon call and DeviceIoControl call. You can easily add error tracing for other functions, but i guess the most probable reason is DeviceIoControl.

This teached me, that USB-Devices are detected, but their drivers do NOT support IOCTL_DISK_PERFORMANCE requests.... Error number 50: Request not supported 

[PBrennick]

On my machine (XP), neither of the monitors that can be found here report any of my USB drives (2 sticks and 1 platter type.  Whatever, I don't know how to decribe them.)  The platter type is on the floor under my table and the cat loves to sleep on top of it and really gets miffed if I shut the system down.

The USB drives  not being reported is no big deal AFAIAC.
Paul

[Ghirai]

Strange, when i started up by pc thismorning, it worked fine, and it still does

[John]

Phoenix,
This is exactly what I had in mind when I posted a question about it a few weeks ago (http://www.masmforum.com/simple/index.php?topic=4108.0). I never could get the pdh.dll version working but this works perfectly.

Nice work! 

[John]

I'm having problems on my home computer. It is an eMachines T6520 XP Pro with SP2, 2 Physical drives with one partioned into two logical drives, 4 removeable drives (none with disks inserted), one USB CF card reader (no disk inserted), and two CD drives. 1 gig of ram and a 2.4 ghz AMD processor (3400+). The errors reported when I run the one with errors reported are 1: Incorrect Function and 50: The request is not supported. The icon doesn't change at all.

It works great on my work computer though.

[Phoenix]

I'm having problems on my home computer.

Very strange. I have no clue. "The request is not supported" error is at least caused by the USB CF reader and the CD Drives. However, the physical drives should be reported anyway, if they are IDE/ATAPI/SATA. (BTW, nice Box! do you use the standard windows XP drivers?)  Can you tell me where the "Incorrect Function" error comes from? Possibly from Shell_NotifyIcon?

I am just testing another version of HddMon, this one checks disk activity by volumes and shows info per volume in a small dialog. As soon i get this one working, i will post it - it should be easier to track errors because of different ways of drawing.

Regards, Phoenix