Copyright: Copyrigh © 1998-1999 Mark Russinovich


Diskmon Help

Diskmon for Windows NT 4

Copyright (C) 1998 Mark Russinovich

http://www.sysinternals.com

Introduction

Diskmon is a GUI/device driver combination that together monitor and display all hard disk activity on a system. It has advanced search capabilities that make it a powerful tool for exploring the way NT works and seeing how file systems use the hard disks.

Diskmon works on NT 4.0. If you are running Windows 2000 or higher download Diskmon for those versions at Sysinternals.

Starting Diskmon

Simply run the Diskmon GUI (Diskmon.exe) from the same directory that the driver (dmon.sys) resides in. Note that it must be located on a non-network drive and you must have administrative privilege to run Diskmon. Menus, hot-keys, or toolbar buttons can be used to clear the window, save the monitored data to a file, and to search output.

As events are printed to the output, they are tagged with a sequence number. If Diskmon’s  internal buffers are overflowed during extremely heavy activity, this will be reflected with gaps in the sequence number.

Each time you exit Diskmon it remembers the position of the window and the widths of the output columns.

Limiting Output

The History Depth entry in the History dialog allows you to specify the maximum number of lines that will be remembered in the output window. A depth of 0 is used to signify no limit.

Searching the Output

You can search the output window for strings using the Find menu item (or the find toolbar button). Once you have opened a Find dialog and hit the FindNext button, you can repeat the search without changing the focus back to the Find dialog by hitting the F3 key.

To start a search at a particular line in the output, select the desired line by clicking on the far left column (the index number). If no line is selected a new search starts at the first entry in searching down, and at the last entry for searching up.

Using Diskmon as a System-Tray Disk Light

You can have Diskmon reside in the system tray as a disk light simply by choosing the Options|Minimize To Tray menu item, or by starting Diskmon with the “/l” command-line switch. When Diskmon detects disk reads it will present a green disk light and when it detects disk writes it presents a red disk light. Note that Diskmon does not capture output to its window while it is in the tray. To reenable the Diskmon window double-click on the Diskmon tray disk light.

Reporting Bugs and Feedback

If you encounter a problem while running Diskmon, please visit http://www.sysinternals.com to obtain the latest version. If you still have problems, please record all the information in the top few lines of a Blue Screen, as well as the section of addresses and driver names just above the administrative message. Determine if the problem is reproducible and if so, how, and send this information to:

mark@sysinternals.com