New App: Disk Health Monitor

[Larry Sabo]

"One or more disk events occurred before the real-time monitor was started."

Hi Nick! Posted the following on the DHM forum but double-posting it here for information. The forum had 0 posts before mine, maybe because nobody has had any problems/questions.

"One or more disk events occurred before the real-time monitor was started."

I have periodically been getting these notices regarding a customer's system. (Her hard drive has a warning regarding "Current pending sector count" and I have advised her to get a new hard drive if I get disk event warnings on an ongoing basis.) I thought these messages were generated when DHM was first installed and that future disk events would result in an e-mail message as they occurred while DHM is running. It seems as if they are generated when she reboots her system and only rarely do I get a disk event e-mail because of a new event, i.e. produced after DHM has started. So I'm curious how she gets a disk even between shutdown and DHM restarting, but not during normal operation.

My question is: Is the same pre-installation disk event being reported each restart, or are these new disk events that should prompt immediate replacement of the drive? If the former, perhaps DHM should only send them if they haven't been sent before, if that's feasible.

Cheers,
Larry

Edit: I've received 3 of them today alone!

 

[Xander]

Larry, have you tried clearing the event log? If it's reporting old events....?

 

[FoolishTech]

Hi Nick! Posted the following on the DHM forum but double-posting it here for information. The forum had 0 posts before mine, maybe because nobody has had any problems/questions.

"One or more disk events occurred before the real-time monitor was started."

I have periodically been getting these notices regarding a customer's system. (Her hard drive has a warning regarding "Current pending sector count" and I have advised her to get a new hard drive if I get disk event warnings on an ongoing basis.) I thought these messages were generated when DHM was first installed and that future disk events would result in an e-mail message as they occurred while DHM is running. It seems as if they are generated when she reboots her system and only rarely do I get a disk event e-mail because of a new event, i.e. produced after DHM has started. So I'm curious how she gets a disk even between shutdown and DHM restarting, but not during normal operation.

My question is: Is the same pre-installation disk event being reported each restart, or are these new disk events that should prompt immediate replacement of the drive? If the former, perhaps DHM should only send them if they haven't been sent before, if that's feasible.

Cheers,
Larry

Edit: I've received 3 of them today alone!

DHM should only be reading the events that occurred between the event log entry that is written when Windows is first started - so it should *not* be reading old log entries.

If you had the luxury, I would suggest clearing the event logs as eHousecalls suggested, to ensure there isn't a bug in DHM - but if everything is working as expected, you are getting a new disk event every time Windows starts on that PC - and I would recommend replacement of that drive!

Why you don't get additional events while it is running (after startup) may be that the issue is only noticed by Windows on startup. When Windows starts up it is doing a lot more (and accessing a lot more areas of the disk) than the client herself is probably doing with the computer as she uses it for solitaire and email or whatever.

EDIT: also, one of my own personal PCs does this sort of - gives me a disk error on every startup, but very rarely will it throw an error while Windows is actually up and running after some time (as my PC does give the occasional error while Windows is running, I believe this is probably because I use that PC a lot more heavily than your client probably does, else I'm sure you would be getting "while running" errors from your client as well.) But that's just a guess. BTW in my case, the HDD is in fact going south with some SMART data reporting well outside of threshold; I'm just too lazy to do anything about it as it isn't a very important PC in my collection / no important data on it - that and HDD prices being so high right now hehe.)

Let me know what happens.

 

[Larry Sabo]

Thanks eHousecalls and FoolishTech for the suggestions and comments. I'll clear the event viewer and see if it continues. I also get these for my own system on rare occasion, yet both my drives are healthy. Actually, I've been getting them on flash drives, so I'll look into that posibility in my customer's case, too. Just reviewed a few of them and some of them are legit. Here they are:

========= 1st one received; received in duplicate (happens regularly):
Event Log: System
Event Type: warning
Event ID: 51
Source Name: Disk
Message: An error was detected on device \Device\Harddisk1\D during a paging operation.
========== received 26-Nov:
One or more disk events occurred before the real-time monitor was started.
========== received 27-Nov.:
One or more disk events occurred before the real-time monitor was started.
========== received today at 10.:14 (also received in duplicate):
One or more disk events occurred before the real-time monitor was started.
========== received today at 10.:16:
One or more disk events occurred before the real-time monitor was started.
==========

I think the duplicates have something to do with using my gmail smtp but directing the e-mails to my business account, which I also forward to my gmail inbox and re-forward to my personal teksavvy account for double junk-mail filtering and limiting spam. More study required on that aspect.

Cheers