smartd failed

[Aleksandar Milivojevic]

Jim wrote:
> when i boot up,  i view whats going on and every time it says  
> 
> starting smartd                                                  [failed]
> 
> what is smartd and do i need it?  

Smartd monitors S.M.A.R.T. status of your disk drives (if your disks 
support it, and if you have it turned on, usually settable from BIOS, 
you can also use smartctl command to switch it on and off after you boot 
(again, if your disks support the feature).  You can also use smartctl 
utility to display S.M.A.R.T. status of disks and S.M.A.R.T. properties 
in human readable format (among other stuff, most disks will tell you 
for how long they were working, how many times they were powered on/off, 
spinned up and down, current temperature of disk, and so on, list of 
actual properties reported varies from disk to disk).

In theory, S.M.A.R.T. is able to detect that something is going wrong 
with your disk before it actually goes south.  So it gives you a warning 
it is time to buy replacement disk, copy your data to it, and ditch the 
old one.  It works by monitoring various internal properties of disk 
(average seek times, positioning errors, read errors, and so on) that 
user is not normally aware of.  This is theory.  Sometime this works 
(you get warning before disk actuall dies), sometime it doesn't (disk 
just dies, no warning).  And sometimes it gives false warnings (for 
example there was a bug in firmware of some Fujitsu disks that would 
give "old age" failure after disk was used for several months).

Do "grep smartd /var/log/messages" to see why exactly it failed.  Most 
IDE drives have S.M.A.R.T. support (but it is often turned off in BIOS), 
as well as some SCSI drives.  Smartd doesn't support SATA drives yet, 
probably will one day...

-- 
Aleksandar Milivojevic <amilivojevic at pbl.ca>    Pollard Banknote Limited
Systems Administrator                           1499 Buffalo Place
Tel: (204) 474-2323 ext 276                     Winnipeg, MB  R3T 1L7