Hi Dustin, On Fri, Jun 17, 2005 at 11:31:24AM -0700, Dustin wrote: > On Fri, 17 Jun 2005, Guido Guenther wrote: > > > Hmm...o.k. I'll have to check which version of smartmontools supports > > SATA, might be only in CVS. Might be a moment since I'm currently > > without a reliable net connection (moved to a new home). > > OK. If the problem is that my version of smartmontools doesn't support > SATA, at least I know why and not to try to look for a configuration > problem. Let me know when it went in, I can check out the CVS version if > necessary. > > Having that clue, I looked again on the net and found this: > > http://gentoo-wiki.com/HARDWARE_SATA > > which claims that libata is the problem--if this still true, I'd have to > patch the kernel to get SATA support. First of all I made a typo. It should read -d ata not -d sata. Furthermore smartmontools documentation says:
Smartmontools should work correctly with SATA drives under both Linux 2.4 and 2.6 kernels, if you use the standard IDE drivers in drivers/ide. If you use the new libata drivers, it won't work correctly because libata doesn't yet support the needed ATA-passthrough ioctl() calls. Jeff Garzik, the libata developer, says that this support will be added to libata in the future. When this happens, we'll add support to smartmontools for a new SATA/libata device type '-d sata'. Typically, to force an SATA disk to run using the standard (non-libata) drivers, you must use the BIOS to select "legacy mode" for the controller. If the IDE driver doesn't support your particular SATA controller, or the controller doesn't have a legacy interface, then only libata can be used. Unless the hard disk controller on the system motherboard is Intel, VIA or nVidia, standard IDE drivers may not work Note: an unofficial patch to libata that allows smartmontools to be used with the standard '-d ata' device type was posted to the linux kernel mailing list at the end of August 2004. The patch is included in the libata-dev patchset that can be applied to a recent Linux kernel (>= 2.6.9). With a SATA disk driven by a libata driver, smartmontools can now be used by specifying both the device type 'ata' and the SCSI device corresponding to this disk, for example, smartctl -i -d ata /dev/sda. The patch is still under development and it is probably best to make sure that the disk is idle before trying smartmontools. So unless the libata code is in mainline now (it wasnt in the beginning of June and it definitely isn't in the kernels debian ships) you need a patched kernel to get smartctl to work. See Jeff's libata-dev patchset. Let me know if I can be of any more help. Cheers, -- Guido -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
