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Smartmontools Download and Installation

Table of Contents

  1. Install precompiled package
    1. Install the Windows package
  2. Install from the source tarball
  3. Install latest unreleased code from SVN repository
  4. Update the drive database
  5. Run smartmontools from Live-system

Smartmontools 6.4 was released 2015-06-04, see NEWS​, ChangeLog​ and tickets for details.

After installation or booting from a Live-CD, you can read smartmontools man pages and try out the commands: 

  man smartd.conf
  man smartctl
  man smartd
  
  sudo /usr/sbin/smartctl -s on -o on -S on /dev/sda
  sudo /usr/sbin/smartctl -x /dev/sda

Note that the default location for the manual pages are /usr/share/man/man5 and /usr/share/man/man8. If 'man' doesn't find them, then you may need to add /usr/share/man to your MANPATH environment variable.

The Windows package provides preformatted man pages in *.html and *.txt format.

Install precompiled package

Precompiled packages are available for many distributions, see the Packages page.

Install the Windows package

Download and run the latest smartmontools ​NSIS-installer (*.win32-setup.exe) from ​here. More recent Windows test releases build from SVN snapshots are available ​here.

The default install type "Full" creates start menu shortcuts including an uninstaller, and adds the install directory to the PATH variable. The install type "Extract files only" is useful to unpack a "portable" version without affecting the Windows registry. The files can also be unpacked by ​7-Zip which is also available for ​Linux.

The 32-bit version of smartmontools usually works also on 64-bit versions of Windows. Starting with smartmontools 5.43, the installer also provides 64-bit executables. These may be useful if the 32-bit subsystem is not available (e.g. 64-bit Windows Recovery CD).

Virus scanners occasionally produce false positive virus reports for NSIS-installers, see the ​NSIS False Positives page. If this is the case for the smartmontools installer, please send a report to the smartmontools-support mailing list.

To use the smartd warning mail feature, download and install the ​Blat mail utility.

The ​Chocolatey package manager provides install scripts for ​smartmontools, ​GSmartControl and ​Blat.

See the ​WPKG-Wiki for info about automated deployment of smartmontools and Blat.

Alternatively you could use the ​Smartmontools for Windows Package by Ozy de Jong. This independent package provides user friendly support for smartd configuration and unattended setup.

Install from the source tarball

Download the latest source tarball from ​here. More recent test tarballs build from SVN snapshots are available ​here.

Uncompress the tarball: 

  tar zxvf smartmontools-6.3.tar.gz

The previous step created a directory called smartmontools-6.3 containing the code. Go to that directory, build, and install: 

  cd smartmontools-6.3
  ./configure
  make
  sudo make install

These optional arguments of ./configure are fully explained in the INSTALL​ file. The most important one is --prefix to change the default installation directories. If you don't pass any arguments to ./configure all files will reside under /usr/local to not interfere with files from your distribution.

To compile from another directory (avoids overwriting virgin files from the smartmontools package) replace ./configure [options] by: 

  mkdir objdir
  cd objdir
  ../configure [options]

To install to another destination (useful for testing and to avoid overwriting an existing smartmontools installation) replace make install by: 

  make DESTDIR=/home/myself/smartmontools-test install

Use a full path: ~/smartmontools-test would work but ./smartmontools-test won't.

The smartmontools binaries for Windows can also be build from the source tarball (or from SVN) using the ​MinGW or the ​MinGW-w64 compiler. Build environments may be ​Cygwin or ​MSYS, cross-compilation under Linux is also supported. Extra ./configure arguments --host=... and --build=... may be required. The make install command does not work for Windows. See INSTALL​ file for details.

Install latest unreleased code from SVN repository

Sourceforge moved our repository to a new location: ​http://svn.code.sf.net/p/smartmontools/code/. Use the trac or ​sourceforge viewer to browse it.

You can also download the source tree via the code browser link ​Download Snapshot.

For those, who don't already have a Subversion client installed, here is a ​list of SVN Packages and a ​comparison of SVN clients for different operating systems and in all colors and flavours. (Stand-alone clients, Desktop-integrated clients, IDE plug-in clients, ..)

All you need to do to get the latest development code is (but note that the development code may be unstable, and that the documentation and code may be inconsistent): 

  svn co http://svn.code.sf.net/p/smartmontools/code/trunk/smartmontools smartmontools

This will create a subdirectory called smartmontools/ containing the code. Go to that directory, build, and install: 

  cd smartmontools
  ./autogen.sh
  ./configure
  make
  sudo make install

See notes under Install from source tarball for different options to ./configure and other useful remarks.

To update your sources from trunk (development version): 

  cd smartmontools
  svn update

One of the really cool things about version control systems is that you can get any version of the code you want, from the first release up the the most current development version. And it's trivial, because each release is tagged with a name. Look at the ​tags in our SVN repository to see what the different names are.

E.g. run the following command to fetch the RELEASE_5_38 release: 

  svn co http://svn.code.sf.net/p/smartmontools/code/tags/RELEASE_5_38/sm5 smartmontools

Note that the directory with the smartmontools sourcefiles is named sm5 in releases <= 5.38.

The rest of the build procedure is the same like described above.

Update the drive database

The drive database file drivedb.h can be updated separately with the following command: 

  sudo /usr/sbin/update-smart-drivedb

This command uses ​curl, ​wget or ​lynx for download. A proxy server can be specified by the environment variable http_proxy (lower case only), see the man pages of the above commands.

The Windows package provides update-smart-drivedb.exe. It reads the proxy configuration from IE registry key.

The above update method does no longer work for smartmontools older than 6.2. The update-smart-drivedb tools from 5.40 to 6.1 use a download URL which is no longer valid since sourceforge platform upgrades.

The drivedb.h file can now be viewed using the new repository browser: ​5.40, ​5.41, ​5.42, ​5.43, ​6.0, ​6.1, ​6.2, ​6.3, ​trunk.

Or you can download the new file directly (as a text file): ​5.40, ​5.41, ​5.42, ​5.43, ​6.0, ​6.1, ​6.2, ​6.3, ​trunk.

Run smartmontools from Live-system

If you have a system that is showing signs of disk trouble (for example, it's unbootable and the console is full of disk error messages) it can be handy to have a version of smartmontools that can be run off of a bootable medium to examine the disk's SMART data and run self-tests. This is also useful if you want to run Captive Self-Tests (the -C option of smartctl ) on disks that can not easily be unmounted, such as those hosting the Operating System files. Or you can use this to run smartctl on computers that don't use Linux as the day-to-day operating system.

Please see the list of Live CDs/DVDs containing smartmontools.

License
All content in this wiki is published under ​GNU GPL.

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