Re: Hard disk going-bad detection

smartmontools can enable SMART on your hard drives even if the BIOS had
disabled them. Sometimes it can even force the BIOS to always turn it on,
but it does depend on the BIOS. Some of them are picky about that.

Naram Qashat
----- Original Message -----
From: "Matthew Hagerty" <matthew@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
To: "mal content" <artifact.one@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Cc: <freebsd-hackers@xxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Tuesday, August 29, 2006 12:29 AM
Subject: Re: Hard disk going-bad detection


mal content wrote:
On 29/08/06, Matthew Hagerty <matthew@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Greetings,

I have a hard drive that every now and then makes a sound like the head
is moving from one extreme to the other, then parking. It is hard to
explain, kind of a towk-kok-click with a metallic ring to it. If you
have heard a drive do this before, you know the sound. I heard a drive
do this to me a few months ago and it failed shortly thereafter.

I have 3 drives in the system so it is very hard to know which drive it
is, so in an attempt to get a new drive before the one fails out right,
is there any way I can test the drives in place? One drive is
primarily
my system disk (20G), the second (120G) has /usr mounted on it, and the
third (120G) is mounted, rsync'd, umounted every night to make a backup
of the other two. So, the backup drive I can test no problem, even
destructively if necessary. However, the two that make up the active
system I would like to be able to test without disrupting normal
operation if possible? But, I'll take the box offline for a bit if
necessary. Any insight would be greatly appreciated.


Your setup is exactly identical to mine, even down to mount points and
disk sizes.

Try smartmontools, most drives support S.M.A.R.T so you should have
no trouble:

http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/cvsweb.cgi/ports/sysutils/smartmontools/

It's useful for identifying drives that are about to die.

You shouldn't need to take the machine offline.

MC

Does SMART have to be enabled in the BIOS for smartmontools to work?
I've always seen the SMART setting in the BIOS but it is always been
defaulted to "disabled" on just about every motherboard I have ever
worked with, and I never took the time to look up what it was. I'll
give smartd and smartmontools a try and see what they tell me. Thanks.

Matthew

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