Mark Hull-Richter wrote: > I recently added a Seagate 400Gb SATA drive to my system, and it has > been behaving strangely since I put it in. for one thing, the BIOS > S.M.A.R.T. came up with a warning the last time I booted with it > enabled, saying that I should backup my data and replace the disk (!). > > I still have not made any irreversible data transfers to this drive, and > I have some time yet to take it back, but I'd like to know for sure that > it needs it, or at least have some reasonable evidence of failure. > > What is a good program out there that exercises a disk to give some > assurance of errors or lack thereof? I found that older versions of smartmontools (even the one included with CentOS 5) do not handle newer onboard SataII controllers. In my case, one system is running CentOS 4 -- that motherboard has an Nvidia MCP northbridge (sata_nv). I ended up building kernel 2.6.20.1 to get it working better. My other machine has an Intel P965 Express northbridge. In the former case I downloaded the smartmontools-5.37.2 source and built it; in the latter I downloaded the fedora core 7 development source rpm for smartmontools (also 5.37-2). In both cases smartctl -a started working properly with the combo a newer kernel and latest version of smartmontools.