smartd problems

[Bill Tangren]

I have had an ongoing problem with smartd on one system (a Dell Precision 670) 
with a SCSI hard disk. When I start smartd this is what shows up in the logs:

Dec 19 17:24:30 mach2 smartd[18726]: smartd version 5.33 
[x86_64-redhat-linux-gnu] Copyright (C) 2002-4 Bruce Allen
Dec 19 17:24:30 mach2 smartd[18726]: Home page is 
http://smartmontools.sourceforge.net/
Dec 19 17:24:30 mach2 smartd[18726]: Opened configuration file /etc/smartd.conf
Dec 19 17:24:30 mach2 smartd[18726]: Configuration file /etc/smartd.conf parsed.
Dec 19 17:24:30 mach2 smartd[18726]: Device: /dev/sda, opened
Dec 19 17:24:30 mach2 smartd[18726]: Device: /dev/sda, Bad IEC (SMART) mode 
page, err=-5, skip device
Dec 19 17:24:30 mach2 smartd[18726]: Unable to register SCSI device /dev/sda at 
line 1 of file /etc/smartd.conf
Dec 19 17:24:30 mach2 smartd[18726]: Unable to register device /dev/sda (no 
Directive -d removable). Exiting.
Dec 19 17:24:30 mach2 smartd: smartd startup failed

Googling on these errors produced little, except for possibly some problem with 
an ATA hard disk, which I don't *think* applies here. My smartd.conf file 
contains the default:

/dev/sda -H -m root at localhost.localdomain

which works just fine on all my other servers.

Any thoughts?

Bill Tangren