Super User is a question and answer site for computer enthusiasts and power users. Join them; it only takes a minute:

Sign up
Here's how it works:
  1. Anybody can ask a question
  2. Anybody can answer
  3. The best answers are voted up and rise to the top

When running SMART-Tests using smartmontools, they NEVER finish. I always get "Interrupted (host reset.)" on various different systems and disks, including Debian in x86 and ARM, OS X on x64, with external and internal drives. Even when run in captive mode with disks all empty (zeroed with dd).

What am I doing wrong?

share|improve this question
    
Your not doing anything wrong you. Its the hardware that isn't working – Ramhound Jun 10 '14 at 14:00
    
Is it meant to work at all? – Max Ried Jun 10 '14 at 14:05
    
Yes it should be working – Ramhound Jun 10 '14 at 14:06
    
@MaxRied, are you saying you've tried this on lots of different computers with logs of different disks, and still never seen a completion, even for disks that you know to be healthy from a differant SMART analysis tool? – Frank Thomas Jun 10 '14 at 14:10
    
@FrankThomas Yes. – Max Ried Jun 10 '14 at 16:32

When the drive does not handle any input/output activity during the test, it may go to standby, which raises the Interrupted (host reset) condition. Try to read from the disk at suitable intervals:

while true; do dd if=/dev/disk1 of=/dev/null count=1; sleep 60; done

(replace /dev/disk1 with the appropriate device; reads one sector from that device every 60 seconds until you hit ctrl-c)

This helped in my environment: OS X 10.6.8, WD Elements USB-connected drive, SAT-SMART-driver 0.8.

A captive test should theoretically keep the drive online. Yet the hardware command send by smartctl may time out before the test completes, causing the kernel to reset the link and ending up in the same situation as above (bug #303).

See this thread on the smartmontools-support mailing list for further details. I acknowledge Christian Franke for the insight given here.

share|improve this answer
    
Other possible interruptions (serverfault.com/a/584055): a bad cable can cause timeouts, and the kernel will trigger a reset. I'm less sure it's necessary to stop smartd. Any timeouts and interruptions will appear in dmesg/kern.log/journalctl -fk. – Tobu Nov 13 '14 at 14:40

You must log in to answer this question.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged .