How To Monitor Disk Errors?

[Drew Tomlinson]

On 11/22/2005 6:18 PM Nicolas Blais wrote:

>On November 22, 2005 09:05 pm, Drew Tomlinson wrote:
>  
>
>>I have an old machine running 4.11.  It died sometime last night from
>>what I think was a disk problem.  The machine was still running and
>>still passing packets (it is my firewall) but I could not log in via the
>>console, ssh, or telnet.  I powered the machine off/on and heard the
>>"click of death" coming from one of the internal IDE drives.  By some
>>miracle, the machine did finally boot and is running again.
>>
>>I'm sure I'm on borrowed time here.  However I would like to find some
>>way to monitor drive errors so I know which drive is failing so replace
>>the correct drive.  I have two in the machine.  I've checked
>>/var/log/messages but see no entries there regarding the drive.  Is
>>there some utility that will let me see the current number of errors
>>since boot?
>>
>>Thanks,
>>
>>Drew
>>    
>>
>
>Check out /sysutils/smartmontools in the ports.  It could be what you need.
>When installed, a simple smartctl -H /dev/*disk* like :
>smartctl -H /dev/ad0 will tell you if your drive is healthy or not.  
>
>You can also set up the smartd which will check your drives at certain 
>intervals.
>
>Nicolas
>  
>


Thanks for your reply.  However it appears I need to be at FBSD ver 5.0 
or higher to use this tool.  Here's the output:

blacksheep# smartctl -H /dev/ad0
smartctl version 5.33 [i386-portbld-freebsd4.11] Copyright (C) 2002-4 
Bruce Allen
Home page is http://smartmontools.sourceforge.net/

ATA support is not provided for this kernel version. Please ugrade to a 
recent 5-CURRENT kernel (post 09/01/2003 or so)
Smartctl: Device Read Identity Failed (not an ATA/ATAPI device)

A mandatory SMART command failed: exiting. To continue, add one or more 
'-T permissive' options.

Cheers,

Drew

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