[plug] SMART drive error resetting

Denis Brown dsbrown at cyllene.uwa.edu.au
Fri Aug 2 15:34:52 WST 2002


Hello,

An IBM ThinkPad 390 with 3 gig TravelStar drive, displays a SMART error at 
cold boot.  The drive continues to function okay and has been replaced for 
the "usual" user of the system.  Rather than bin the drive, I would like to 
see if it is possible to resurrect it and install a Linux distro since I 
can borrow the laptop from time to time and swap in my Linux-ified hard drive.

IBM's disk utilities seem to think the disk surface is okay, the Win98 
surface scanner agrees.   I suspect they are telling the truth because the 
"failure" was coincident with a catastrophic battery failure which did not 
give the (Win 98) system time to perform an orderly shutdown.  I've let the 
IBM utilities nuke the disk but this does not in fact erase the SMART log info.

Please note that I am *not* advocating the wholesale resetting of SMART 
logs but rather that it is not a mission critical thing in this case if the 
drive is in fact faulty and my Linux suffers infant mortality :-)

Question:
Are there any Linux-based utilities which can *reset* the SMART status of a 
drive?  Done the Googling and HOWTO-ing without success.  Closest I come is 
ide-smart but that is a monitoring tool.

TIA,
Denis




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