Carlos E. R. wrote:
The Monday 2004-10-11 at 13:37 +0200, Hylton Conacher (ZR1HPC) wrote:
If I remember correctly SMART is a technology implemented by the BIOS and so I shall check there too.
Any comments about the difference between the BIOS and software SMART? What if they are both enabled, can one break the other, does one rely on the other, is the BIOS on even used by Linux? Do I need to turn it on in BIOS so that the software SMART can work etc?
- The computer BIOS does have an entry named SMART. I do have it enabled, but I don't know what it does, and I don't care.
- The SMART test procedures, logs, etc, reside inside the HD and HD firmware. The computer is not involved: not the BIOS, not the CPU, not the software. There is no software smart.
- What you need is just a piece of software to read SMART data, and to start the tests. Once started, the computer does nothing else, and it can continue working normally, except that the HD is slower to respond to request. When the test finishes, you can use that software to retrieve the test results from the HD itself.
- Let me repeat: it is not the computer which runs the test: it is the HD which runs it, on its own.
There are two flavors of such software in the linux package. One, a CLI program. The other is a daemon. You choose, or use both.
Some HD makers provide a HD test floppy disk, bootable. The Seagate one, for example, can trigger a smart test, or it can replicate it under CPU control; this can be done as Seagate obviously knows how to test Seagate's HD. That is a diferent thing.
More info, on smartmon package docs. :-) Tnx for the info and sorry for the belated reply. I have enabled smartctl to perform checks by issuing the command, as root:
smartctl -s on /dev/hdb and smartctl -o /dev/hdb and hope that will be partly sufficient. The next step is not to worry about the HDD physical structure but to concentrate on making sure the data structure is error ie no bad blocks etc ie the e2fsck cmd. -- The Little Helper ======================================================================== Hylton Conacher - Linux user # 229959 at http://counter.li.org Currently using SuSE 9.0 Professional with KDE 3.1 Licenced Windows user ========================================================================