**** How to get the smartctl going on SATA harddisks ****
****              Kees Lemmens, February 2006        ****

For parallel IDE disks the tools

smartctl -s on    /dev/hda
smartctl -a       /dev/hda
smartctl -t short /dev/hda 
etc.

are very useful tools to check for errors on a harddisk. However, this
unfortunately doesn't work on serial ATA drives working through libata.

But, there is a patch you can apply to your (recent) kernel at :

http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/people/jgarzik/libata/

cd /usr/src/linux
cat /path/to/patch/2.6.15-libata1.patch.bz2 | patch -p1
make menuconfig
make 
make modules_install

After recompiling an installing the patched kernel and modules you can use
the standard smartctl tools. But note it should be used in the following
slightly modified way to make it work :

smartctl -d ata -s on    /dev/sda
smartctl -d ata -a       /dev/sda
smartctl -d ata -t short /dev/sda