No subject
Sat Oct 14 20:46:50 EDT 2006
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.
--
Seeya,
Paul
More information about the gnhlug-discuss
mailing list