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Using S.M.A.R.T. Disk Monitor
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Using S.M.A.R.T. Disk Monitor
1.1
General Overview
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S.M.A.R.T. Disk Monitor (also known as SMARTMon) is a utility that monitors your disk hardware with the goal of
identifying disks that have a strong possibility if crashing. This provides you a window of opportunity to gracefully
remove data from a failing disk and take it off-line ... Before your disk drive takes you off-line.
SMARTMon allows you to access the predictive failure functionality native to most disk drives. This hardware feature
is called S.M.A.R.T., which stands for Self-Monitoring, Analysis and Reporting Technology. IBM, Seagate, Fujitsu,
Quantum, Western Digital, and other drive manufacturers put this feature into their disk drives. Typical attributes that
are monitored include head flying height, temperature, spin-up time, retries, and internal error logs. If a drive is
running outside of a vendor's specifications, then our software alerts your administrator.
If your disk drives are in a SES-Compliant (SCSI Enclosure Services) enclosure, then the software will also be able
to poll the enclosure to determine health of it's components, such as power supply and fans. Note, that this feature is
not enabled for the personal edition.
Note: Throughout this manual, when we use the acronym SCSI, we are not implying only parallel-SCSI. Our
software works with serial SCSI devices as well. More common serial SCSI interfaces include Fibre Channel
(FC-AL), and Serial Storage Architecture (SSA). In addition, we support IDE disk drives on most computers.
1.2
Hardware & Software Requirements
1.2.1
Windows 95/98 IDE Drivers
If your computer is running Microsoft Windows '95, or Windows '98, then our software requires the use of some
specific drivers in order to discover your IDE disk drives. They are included in SMARTMon, and will be installed
automatically for you if you do not have them. Although these drivers come with Windows 95 OSR2 and above, it is
possible that they were not pre-loaded on your system.
Specifically, we require the Microsoft version of the files:
<bootdir>:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM\IOSUBSYS\ESDI_506.PDR
<bootdir>:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM\IOSUBSYS\SMARTVSD.VXD
Where <bootdir> represents the disk drive that your O/S is booted to.
If either of these files are missing, corrupted, or not the correct version, then SMARTMon may not detect your IDE
disk drives.
Combined, these files allow the software to gracefully talk directly to your IDE disk drives, without the operating
system getting in the way, and without causing data loss or interruption while other applications are concurrently
communicating with your disk drives.
Known Compatibility Problems (IDE only, Windows '95/98)
Due to limitations with Microsoft's drivers, this software may not detect your IDE drives on the following systems:
· Any system that is running in MS-DOS compatibility mode.
· Micron '486 DX/2 using PhoenixBios(TM) A486 ver6.
· 90 Mhz Pentium-based system with Award BIOS version 4.50g.
· Any system running the first release of Windows '95.
· Windows 1.x through Windows 3.x based systems.
SMARTVSD Troubleshooting Checklist
· The ESDI_506.PDR and SMARTVSD.VXD files must be installed in \WINDOWS\SYSTEM\IOSUBSYS. We have
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