[smartmontools-support] SMART Status command failed

[Alfred G. <alf...@ag...>]

Ladies and Gentlemen,

I tried to find help in the mail archive for my small problem, but had 
real trouble finding anything, so here is my question:

I have been using smartmontools 5.36 on my Centos-5 system for a while
without problems, but 5.36 doesn't support my Maxtor OneTouch, USB based
backup disk, so I just installed smartmontools 5.38 (I used the src rpm 
from Fedora Development and rebuilt it under Centos-5.2, with no changes).

Things still work fine with my other disk as expected, and after some
playing around smartctl finds the OneTouch with "-d sat,12", but requires 
"-T permissive". It seems to find most of what I expected, but gives me 
an error message that says "Please get assistance", which I herewith 
request (the same message shows with other commands as well, but the 
appended one provides what I think might be of interest).

When I used "-d sat,16" during my trials, I noticed that there was no 
error message after the SMART status command. Clearly smartctl wasn't
happy with that access method, but it almost looks like the SMART status
command worked. I don't fully understand the details of all this, but I 
thought it might make sense to someone more knowledgable, so I have 
added the output from that command as well.

Please let me know if I can provide further information.

Thanks for your help, AG

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
# smartctl -i -d sat,12 -T permissive /dev/sdb
smartctl version 5.38 [i686-redhat-linux-gnu] Copyright (C) 2002-8 Bruce Allen
Home page is http://smartmontools.sourceforge.net/

=== START OF INFORMATION SECTION ===
Model Family:     Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 family
Device Model:     ST3250410AS
Serial Number:    6RY3WRG6
Firmware Version: 3.AAC
User Capacity:    250,059,350,016 bytes
Device is:        In smartctl database [for details use: -P show]
ATA Version is:   7
ATA Standard is:  Exact ATA specification draft version not indicated
Local Time is:    Thu Jul 24 20:20:56 2008 EDT
SMART support is: Available - device has SMART capability.
SMART support is: Enabled

Error SMART Status command failed
Please get assistance from http://smartmontools.sourceforge.net/
Values from ATA Return Descriptor are:
 00     09 0c 00 00 50 00 00 00  c2 4f 00 00 00 00                              
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
# smartctl -i -d sat,16 -T permissive /dev/sdb
smartctl version 5.38 [i686-redhat-linux-gnu] Copyright (C) 2002-8 Bruce Allen
Home page is http://smartmontools.sourceforge.net/

=== START OF INFORMATION SECTION ===
Device Model:     [No Information Found]
Serial Number:    [No Information Found]
Firmware Version: [No Information Found]
Device is:        Not in smartctl database [for details use: -P showall]
ATA Version is:   1
ATA Standard is:  Exact ATA specification draft version not indicated
Local Time is:    Fri Jul 25 10:33:42 2008 EDT
SMART is only available in ATA Version 3 Revision 3 or greater.
We will try to proceed in spite of this.
SMART support is: Ambiguous - ATA IDENTIFY DEVICE words 82-83 don't show if SMART supported.
                  Checking for SMART support by trying SMART ENABLE command.
                  SMART ENABLE appeared to work!  Continuing.
SMART support is: Ambiguous - ATA IDENTIFY DEVICE words 85-87 don't show if SMART is enabled.
                  Checking to be sure by trying SMART RETURN STATUS command.
SMART support is: Enabled
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------

-- 
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   Alfred Ganz					alfred-ganz:at:agci.com
   AG Consulting, Inc.				(203) 624-9667
   440 Prospect Street # 11
   New Haven, CT 06511
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