[Wylug-help] Disk health monitoring

[Anne Wilson]

Yesterday I was using my older laptop to test some live CDs.  During one of 
the tests a message popped up saying that my hard drive is failing as it has 
many errors.  Afterwards I did wonder whether it was actually seeing my hard 
drive - I don't know.

Anyway, obviously testing it is needed.  I ran chkdsk under XP first - it 
found no problems.  Then I installed smartmontools under Fedora 13.  I have 
used it in the past and found it helpful.  However, this time either something 
is changed or it is letting me down.  All I see, if I run it in a root 
terminal, is the header telling me that the test is running and estimating the 
time of completion.  I don't get any disk information at all.  I tried sending 
output to a text file, in case it simply wasn't printing its findings, but 
that also only contains the header.

The command I used was

# smartctl -t long /dev/sda > /home/anne/Temp/smartctl.txt

and the output I get is:

smartctl 5.40 2010-10-16 r3189 [i386-redhat-linux-gnu] (local build)
Copyright (C) 2002-10 by Bruce Allen, http://smartmontools.sourceforge.net

=== START OF OFFLINE IMMEDIATE AND SELF-TEST SECTION ===
Sending command: "Execute SMART Extended self-test routine immediately in off-
line mode".
Drive command "Execute SMART Extended self-test routine immediately in off-
line mode" successful.
Testing has begun.
Please wait 44 minutes for test to complete.
Test will complete after Thu May 26 11:51:37 2011

Use smartctl -X to abort test.


The short test does rather better, with

# smartctl -t short -H /dev/sda > /home/anne/Temp/smartctl.txt
[root at anne-laptop ~]# cat /home/anne/Temp/smartctl.txt
smartctl 5.40 2010-10-16 r3189 [i386-redhat-linux-gnu] (local build)
Copyright (C) 2002-10 by Bruce Allen, http://smartmontools.sourceforge.net

=== START OF READ SMART DATA SECTION ===
SMART overall-health self-assessment test result: PASSED


Am I missing something or is this a buggy package?

Anne
-- 
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