New App: Disk Health Monitor

I’m finally cranking out another app that has been an idea on the back burner for some time now.

Disk Health Monitor

This is a real-time monitor, folks, with a tiny footprint. The purpose is to alert you (via system tray pop-up and/or EMAIL) when a potential disk error condition is logged in the NT Event Log, indicating a failing hard disk or a partition that needs some chkdsk TLC.

How it works:

1. The application can be configured to start with Windows automatically.
2. Since disk errors may occur before this application can start, the event log is scanned up to the last system startup and an alert is given if one or more disk errors were detected.
3. After the startup scan, the real-time event log monitor is started.
4. Currently, there is no way to STOP the monitor except by ending task in Task Manager. This will be fixed in a future release.

Which events trigger the alert:

• Event Sources: Disk, DMIO, or chkdsk with the words “harddisk” and either “error”, “corrupt”, or “bad block” in the Event Description
• Event Source: NTFS with the words “corrupt” in the Event Description

I wrote the app both for my own personal main computer, (because I am paranoid about my data) and to ultimately use on client’s workstations and servers as a partial remote monitoring benefit which I can offer my clients.

Currently in BETA, I am personally testing this app on my own gear and a few select clients’ systems, but I could always use a few extra BETA testers! This community has been wonderful at reporting bugs and feature suggestions with D7, (I can’t thank you all enough for the progress that I have made with D7 due to your help) and I’m hoping to get a little of that with this app as well.

So if you feel like running a BETA app on your setup, and think it may be useful, then check it out! Install it, try it, see what happens! Otherwise if you’re interested, but not quite BETA-interested, then I’ll understand and report back here when the app is out of BETA.

Use on a server OS is not allowed until the app is out of BETA.

Oh yeah, the license. It’s FREE for personal use, and will remain so even after BETA is finished, with no nags or ads! I will require a license for commercial use once I get the app out of BETA and add a few more features to make it worth it.

NOTE: With this BETA release, there is no method to actually shut down the monitor, you must end task via Task Manager – be sure and do this before you attempt to uninstall it!!! Sorry for any inconvenience this may cause!

Thanks for looking!