Re: [smartmontools-support] Running smartctl on Windows - Installation Procedure & Unknown Attributes noticed

[Christian F. <Chr...@t-...>]

Arun Anbalagan wrote:
> 1. I have been primarily working on UNIX based servers, and we 
> recently decided to monitor the SMART metrics of our Windows systems 
> as well. I followed the INSTALL instructions as provided in the source 
> tarball. Thus, I installed MinGW gcc compiler and MSYS on my Windows 
> System, and ran "./configure" and "make" on the MSYS terminal, from 
> the directory where the source files were placed. It successfully 
> created the 'smartctl' binary. I copied it another folder under PATH, 
> and tried running it. But, it failed with a message stating that the 
> dll libgcc_s_dw2-1.dll was not found in the computer. As suggested in 
> a discussion forum, I ran "./configure" as "./configure 
> LDFLAGS=-static", and this resolved the problem. Please let me know if 
> I missed something that could have caused this problem. Though I was 
> able to get the issue resolved, I wanted to be sure of whether I did 
> the right thing or not, since this was not discussed in the INSTALL 
> procedure shipped with the source ball.

Yes, you did the right thing
(Note: 6.4 is not the current release).

LDFLAGS=-static is actually missing in the build command for MSYS. It is 
not missing a few lines below in the build commands for the MinGW-w64 
(cross-)compiler.

MinGW-w64 and NSIS cross compilers are used (on Linux) to provide 
release builds and daily builds for Windows:
https://sourceforge.net/projects/smartmontools/files/smartmontools/
http://builds.smartmontools.org/


> 2. Subsequently, when I run the 'smartctl' executable from my Windows 
> folder, I'm able to get the SMART metrics. But, unfortunately, the 
> metric names are reported as 'Unknown Attribute' and the threshold 
> values are just displayed as "---". Is it a normal behavior?
>

The "---" means that SMART READ THRESHOLDS command failed. The output 
also contains only garbage in the SMART attribute table.
Please note this warning printed by smartctl:
   Warning: Limited functionality due to missing admin rights

Please retry with admin rights.


> 'smartctl -a' states that the particular device is not in smartctl 
> database. Could this be the reason for this output?

No. Drive database only affects attribute names and RAW value print 
format (and enables firmware bug workarounds in some rare cases).
https://www.smartmontools.org/wiki/FAQ#MyATASATAdriveisnotinthesmartctlsmartddatabase


> But, when I try the same on another disk device, I'm able to get the 
> attribute names and threshold values, though this disk is also 
> reported as not part of the smartctl database.

This second output is from the same disk (see serial number), now 
accessed via CSMI. This allows to access the physical drives behind a 
logical IRST RAID drive.

Thanks,
Christian