Vincent Danen has some tips for using the smartmontools package to obtain important information about the health of your hard drives that could provide early warning signs of problems.

Last article we introduced the SMART capabilities of hard drives (who knew your drives were SMART?). In this article smartmontools, an application for examining the SMART attributes and trigger self tests, is examined.

GSmartControl is a graphical user interface for smartctl (from Smartmontools package), which is a tool for querying and controlling S.M.A.R.T. (Self-Monitoring, Analysis, and Reporting Technology) data on modern hard disk drives. It allows you to inspect the drive's S.M.A.R.T. data to determine its health, as well as run various tests on it.

GSmartControl is a really useful Linux app to check the health of your hard disk drive. GSmartControl is basically a graphical user interface for smartctl, which is a tool for querying and controlling SMART (Self-Monitoring, Analysis, and Reporting Technology) data on modern hard disk drives. Only ATA drives including both PATA and SATA are supported for now.

This guide shows how to install and use the smartmontools package on Debian Etch and Ubuntu 7.10. The smartmontools package provides utilities to check hard disks for disk degradation and failure, using the Self-Monitoring, Analysis and Reporting Technology System (SMART) built into most modern ATA and SCSI hard disks.

Recent versions of Linux use a unique identifier for hard drives in order to make sure they get mounted to the same location all the time. If you've looked into your /etc/fstab file for auto mounting drives, then you're probably already familiar with the long character strings that are used for UUID's.

I recently spoke with a lady who operates a Forensic Accounting consultancy. During the course of our conversation, she indicated that from time-to-time she receives requests for computer data related assistance. Namely, obtaining deleted information off hard drives or data off failed drives. Her business operates on Windows based platforms and she was wondering how productive I had found Linux.

You will find in this article, a step-by-step guide on how to dual-boot Ubuntu 11.10 and Windows 7 on a computer with two hard drives. The steps involved in this tutorial are very simple.

Did you know your drive was SMART? Actually: Self-Monitoring, Analysis, and Reporting Technology. It can be used to gather information about your hard drives and offers some additional information about the status of your storage devices. It can also be used with other tools to help predict drive failure.