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Smartmontools Download and Installation

Table of Contents

  1. Install precompiled package
    1. Debian Linux - Install the Debian package
    2. Red Hat Enterprise Linux, CentOS and Fedora Linux distributions
    3. Other distributions providing RPM packages
    4. Windows - 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
    1. List of bootable CDs

Smartmontools 5.42 was released 2011-10-20, 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
  
  # Only root can do this
  /usr/sbin/smartctl -s on -o on -S on /dev/hda
  /usr/sbin/smartctl -a /dev/hda

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. The following table provides links to info and/or download locations:

Debian Linux - Install the Debian package

All versions of the smartmontools package in .deb format are available at the ​Debian package search page. You can then install the package using: 

  # you need to be root to do this:
  dpkg -i smartmontools_5.39-1_i386.deb

Red Hat Enterprise Linux, CentOS and Fedora Linux distributions

The smartmontools package is part of the official repositories and can be installed using the yum command: 

  # you need to be root to do this:
  yum install smartmontools

Other distributions providing RPM packages

Download the latest binary RPM file (smartmontools*.rpm) for your distribution. Don't get the SRPM file (*.src.rpm).

Install it using RPM. 

  # you need to be root to do this:
  rpm -ivh smartmontools_5.39-1_i386.deb

If you want to remove the package (rpm -e smartmontools) and your system does not have chkconfig installed, you may need to use: 

  rpm -e --noscripts smartmontools

Windows - 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. Select install type "Extract files only" to disable these extra components. If the ​UBCD4Win-builder is installed, the extra option "UBCD4Win plugin" can be used to add smartmontools to UBCD4Win.

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.

Starting with smartmontools release 5.37, the Windows package is no longer provided as a ZIP archive (*.win32.zip). If the self extracting installer cannot be used for some reason, the files may also be unpacked by a recent version of ​7-Zip.

To use the smartd warning mail feature, download and install the ​Blat mail utility. See the ​WPKG-Wiki for info about automated deployment of smartmontools and Blat.

Install from the source tarball

Download the latest source tarball from ​here.

Uncompress the tarball: 

  tar zxvf smartmontools-5.40.tar.gz

The previous step created a directory called smartmontools-5.40 containing the code. Go to that directory, build, and install: 

  cd smartmontools-5.40
  ./configure
  make
  # you need to be root to do this:
  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

We moved from CVS to a Subversion (SVN) repository. The new address for our repository is ​https://smartmontools.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/smartmontools.

Two repository browsers are available: ​ViewVC and Trac. You can also download the source tree via the ViewVC link ​Download GNU tarball or the Trac link ​Zip Archive.

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 https://smartmontools.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/smartmontools/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
  # you need to be root to do this:
  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 https://smartmontools.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/smartmontools/tags/RELEASE_5_38/sm5 smartmontools

Note that the directory with the smartmontools sourcefiles is named sm5 in releases <= 5.39.

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

Update the drive database

Starting with smartmontools 5.40 the drive database file drivedb.h can be updated separately with the following command: 

  # you need to be root to do this:
  /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.

This does not work on Windows. Download the file drivedb.h from ​SVN trunk instead and copy it into the directory where the exe files are installed.

Smartmontools releases 5.39 and 5.39.1 also support drive database update if the build was configured with --enable-drivedb. The drivedb.h file from the SVN trunk is not compatible with these releases. A compatible version of drivedb.h is maintained on branch RELEASE_5_39_DRIVEDB​. Download this version of drivedb.h from ​here and copy it into the configured directory (typically /usr/share/smartmontools or /usr/local/share/smartmontools).

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.

List of bootable CDs

Please let us know if there are others, and we will add them to this list.

​Fedora Live CD is no longer included in the list because recent releases no longer contain smartmontools.

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

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