S.M.A.R.T. status of HDD's not showing.

[remus_lupin]

I recently had to reinstall windows and after the install my HDD's are not showing their SMART status. I have checked the BIOS and it is enabled there, and as the computer boots I see the HDDs show up as having SMART data enabled, however once in windows I am not enable to retrieve any of the data. (Temperature etc.) I have tried using: Speedfan, HDD Sentinel and AVG PC tuneup.

If I unplug the HDD's and put them into an external enclosure the SMART data shows up.

The drives in question: 2x Western Digital1TB Caviar Black, Western Digital 1TB Caviar Green and a Seagate 2TB Barracuda Green

Running Windows 7 64-bit, fully updated.

[Roger H. Veteran]

what about HWINFO32?

Did you also install your AHCI drivers?

[remus_lupin]

HWINFO: Under my HDDs, under features:

S.M.A.R.T. Feature: Present, Active

Then under Self-Monitoring, Analysis and Reporting Technology there is nothing

Going to re-download AHCI drivers just in case.

[remus_lupin]

Update: used DriverAgent to check for out of date drivers, all are up to date (including Intel SATA AHCI Controller)

[remus_lupin]

Bump

[P!P]

  On 12/10/2011 at 01:55, remus_lupin said:

Update: used DriverAgent to check for out of date drivers, all are up to date (including Intel SATA AHCI Controller)

I'm sorry but it bugs me when people use "DriverAgent" or similar software to check for "out of date drivers". Other than video cards, I rarely see any reason to ever update a driver unless it's having problems. Secondly, S.M.A.R.T. has been around since the 90s, an "out of date driver" is not the problem. Don't take it personally remus; I just deal with people all the time who think "updating" their drivers with POS software is a good thing to do.

A couple suggestions: 1. Are you running these programs you're using to check SMART as an Administrator? 2. Did you make any changes in the BIOs recently? Perhaps the drive mode? I don't think this is the problem though since it should work in every mode unless your BIOs has an issue with that. 3. You said you checked the SMART status in the BIOs, do you have more than one IDE/ SATA controller on your motherboard? Make sure it's enabled for all. The SMART enabled switch maybe under the settings for an additional controller. Did you ever unplug and re-plugin the drives during your re-install?

[Karl L.]

I normally use smartmontools to check my SMART status. According to the project page it looks like you can download it for Windows as well, although I can't attest to how well it works in that environment. If you are really concerned about this being a hardware (or, at least, BIOS/firmware) problem, I recommend trying to check your SMART status in another OS. Ubuntu includes GNOME's Disk Utility by default, which will let you easily check the SMART status of any supported hard disk connected to your system. Otherwise, you could always try smartmontools in GParted Live. (You can install smartmontools in Ubuntu too (sudo apt-get install smartmontools), but, if you don't already have it, the Ubuntu ISO is ~700 MB but the GParted Live ISO is only ~100 MB.)

Quick Tutorial on using smartmontools to check SMART status in Ubuntu/GParted Live:

sudo apt-get install smartmontools parted # Ubuntu only; they are not installed by default.
sudo parted -l # List the disks connected to your system.
sudo smartctl --all /dev/sda # Where sda is the name of your disk. (sda is probably your primary boot disk, sdb secondary, and so on.)
[/CODE]

[remus_lupin]

  On 15/10/2011 at 21:59, P!P said:

I'm sorry but it bugs me when people use "DriverAgent" or similar software to check for "out of date drivers". Other than video cards, I rarely see any reason to ever update a driver unless it's having problems. Secondly, S.M.A.R.T. has been around since the 90s, an "out of date driver" is not the problem. Don't take it personally remus; I just deal with people all the time who think "updating" their drivers with POS software is a good thing to do.

A couple suggestions: 1. Are you running these programs you're using to check SMART as an Administrator? 2. Did you make any changes in the BIOs recently? Perhaps the drive mode? I don't think this is the problem though since it should work in every mode unless your BIOs has an issue with that. 3. You said you checked the SMART status in the BIOs, do you have more than one IDE/ SATA controller on your motherboard? Make sure it's enabled for all. The SMART enabled switch maybe under the settings for an additional controller. Did you ever unplug and re-plugin the drives during your re-install?

Well I didn't actually use the software to update the drivers, just to check if they were up-to-date, as suggested above. I have never used that software before and un-installed it right after checking. But I see where you are coming from

1. Yes

2. No

3. Double checked and all are enabled.

The drives have not been unplugged (only unplugged and moved around after realizing SMART wasn't working)

  On 15/10/2011 at 22:22, xorangekiller said:

I normally use smartmontools to check my SMART status. According to the project page it looks like you can download it for Windows as well, although I can't attest to how well it works in that environment. If you are really concerned about this being a hardware (or, at least, BIOS/firmware) problem, I recommend trying to check your SMART status in another OS. Ubuntu includes GNOME's Disk Utility by default, which will let you easily check the SMART status of any supported hard disk connected to your system. Otherwise, you could always try smartmontools in GParted Live. (You can install smartmontools in Ubuntu too (sudo apt-get install smartmontools), but, if you don't already have it, the Ubuntu ISO is ~700 MB but the GParted Live ISO is only ~100 MB.)

I will try it with linux tomorrow, or I will just reinstall windows and see if that somehow fixes the problem.