no read of SMART info from hdd

[Samsonid]

Hi all,

There are two a SATA drives (one WD740 raptor and a Seagate) on an ASUS a8V mobo. The drives are connected to the SATA1 and SATA2 pins (*not* the ones associated with the RAID controller, neither drive is on an array.. they are both separate)

The system runs fine and has windows 2000 installed on the raptor.

The thing is that in the main BIOS screen there is no primary or secondary IDE master/slave detected at all (yet the system boots fine) ... also I cannot get any SMART info out of the drives. I am trying several HDD monitoring programs and the drives are either invisible to those utilities or they appear with no SMART support.

Would anyone have an idea of what gives ?
Clearly Windows can see the drives, but I am getting no SMART data out of them.

 

[Samsonid]

While booting the system shows that the drives are being picked up by VIA VT6420

 

[Bob Anderson]

Originally posted by: Samsonid
Hi all,

There are two a SATA drives (one WD740 raptor and a Seagate) on an ASUS a8V mobo. The drives are connected to the SATA1 and SATA2 pins (*not* the ones associated with the RAID controller, neither drive is on an array.. they are both separate)

The system runs fine and has windows 2000 installed on the raptor.

The thing is that in the main BIOS screen there is no primary or secondary IDE master/slave detected at all (yet the system boots fine) ... also I cannot get any SMART info out of the drives. I am trying several HDD monitoring programs and the drives are either invisible to those utilities or they appear with no SMART support.

Would anyone have an idea of what gives ?
Clearly Windows can see the drives, but I am getting no SMART data out of them.

Go to the disk manufacturer's web sites and get their diagnostic tools. Seagate calls theirs 'seatools'. These tools will tell you if SMART is supported and give some details.

-Bob

 

[Samsonid]

Hi Bob,

Thanks for the suggestion

I know for sure these drives support SMART, because it was the one feature I explicitly made sure to check before buying either one of these models.

Another interesting thing is that the Raptor drive is recognized as an SCSI ?

 

[Samsonid]

hmm, ok I think I know what is going on --> http://tinyurl.com/33hba8

 

[highwire]

Originally posted by: Samsonid
hmm, ok I think I know what is going on --> http://tinyurl.com/33hba8

From your link:

Problem:
Second Generation Serial ATA hard drives are not detected when connected to a VIA or SIS Serial ATA controller. These First Generation Serial ATA controllers include the following chipsets:

* VT8237

* VT8237R

* VT6420

* VT6421L


* SIS760

* SIS964
...
******

Nice to know. There are a lot of boards with these chips. And, I was wondering, just the other day, why one would one ever need to jump a sata II drive down to sata I. thx

 

[Bob Anderson]

Originally posted by: Samsonid
hmm, ok I think I know what is going on --> http://tinyurl.com/33hba8

Cool. Progress!

-Bob

 

[Samsonid]

I did the jumper thing, but although it has helped others, it did not do anything in my case.
Basically I am back to square one, having no idea.

Also, I booted from a Knoppix CD and used smartctl to check the drives ... and ... that too reports that the drives are not supporting SMART (but I know they do)

For a moment there I thought to physically move the connectors from the VIA to the Promise onboard controller ... but ... I guess you can't switch like midstream since windows was installed while the drives were on the via controller. So, I get a blue screen during boot.

It seems I am on a check-mate situation

 

[Samsonid]

I just double checked and the drives do support SMART

WD740GD: http://www.wdc.com/en/library/sata/2879-001069.pdf
"includes Enterprise Extensions S.M.A.R.T. Accessed
(EESA), an expanded command set that provides SCSI-like control for server environments,
as well as Rotary Acceleration Feed Forward (RAFF?) that optimizes operation and
performance when the drives are used in vibration-prone multi-drive systems, such as
rack-mounted servers."

Seagate ST380817AS
http://tinyurl.com/2jhdq7
The supported S.M.A.R.T. commands for the drive are on page 33

I am beginning to dislike Asus ... their site is perpetually slow or totally non-responsive since ... ever ... (months and months ... years)

 

[Samsonid]

-Booted using KNoppix 5.1 liveCD.
-Mounted the drives (they were detected as /dev/sdba1 and sdba2)
-run the -a command (and others)

No Go.

It reports that "A mandatory SMART command failed. Exiting" ....

Then I tried to enable SMART (just in case) using the -s option ... still no go.

Smartmon tools cannot read the drives from either Linux or windows.

Went back into the BIOS, to doublecheck. There is nothing there to let me enable/disable SMART. This option is only available on the main screen for detected IDE drives... but there are no detected IDE drives ... so the enabling/disabling SMART is ineffectual (both drives are being picked up during POST by the serial channels 0 and 1)

 

[Samsonid]

Caution for anyone. Using Lavalys Everest (or even ActiveSmart) does report SMART info, but they are bogus. Both drives are showing identical data (which should not be the case) and also if you switch to the ATA information tab both utilities report that SMART instructions are *not* supported (yet they attempt to show SMART info on the other tab).

Those data should not be trusted IMHO.

 

[Samsonid]

This is funny.
I made an inquiry with ASUS support and as I was asking about drives, they responded with something completely irrelevant like, if you have stability problems, check your memory, blah, blah ...
It seems these guys have solved the customer support riddle; never read the queries, just copy/paste a canned response for all. Done !