Opened 4 years ago

Closed 4 years ago

Last modified 4 years ago

#1328 closed enhancement (wontfix)

Misleading/ unprecises error message

Reported by: John Owned by:
Priority: minor Milestone:
Component: all Version:
Keywords: Cc:

Description

Executing smartctl.exe -l scterc /dev/hdc (on Windows) I get:

smartctl 6.6 2017-11-05 r4594 [x86_64-w64-mingw32-w10-b17134] (sf-6.6-1)
Copyright (C) 2002-17, Bruce Allen, Christian Franke,www.smartmontools.org

SCT Commands not supported

This is unprecise, because it does not state whether SCT is not supported by Windows build, by the current drive or by some hardware used on my system

Change History (4)

comment:1 by John, 4 years ago

Additional info: I tried using it on a SATA drive that is connected via USB - so this might be an issue as well.

comment:2 by Christian Franke, 4 years ago

Resolution: wontfix
Status: newclosed

These unspecific messages are intentional. It is difficult (and sometimes impossible) to map all corner cases to more specific messages for each platform, for each controller and for each ATA feature check. To prevent misleading messages, I decided 7+ years ago (e.g. r3633) to use unspecific not supported messages.

SCT Commands not supported usually means that the device does not indicate SCT support. But in very rare cases, it may also mean that some layer is unable to transfer the full ATA IDENTIFY information.

comment:3 by John, 4 years ago

I used the same USB -> SATA adapter on Linux and it worked, so it has nothing to do with the drive or the adapter. I agree that a specific but false error message is even worse than an unspecific message, nevertheless it is quite nasty from a user perspective having to eliminate possible reasons one by one. In this case the reason seems to be either that the windows build does not support it or that the Windows build needs a special driver.

As smartmon uses a drive db anyway this could be extended(?)/used to at least reflect whether the drive itself is capable of feature x (because if that is the case all attempts are doomed to fail). Furthermore if there are platform-specific-limitations, especially on a major platform like windows, it would be good to have these in the faq.

However if this is a hardware specific limitation (e.g. this USB adapter does not work on Windows but other adapters do or a specific host controller on a specific OS is a problem) I understand that this might be hard to debug and denote it in the documentation

in reply to:  3 comment:4 by Christian Franke, 4 years ago

I used the same USB -> SATA adapter on Linux and it worked, so it has nothing to do

with the drive or the adapter.

IIRC such a difference was never reported before as USB(SCSI) pass-through I/O-controls are usually transparent.

Please be more specific:
Which adapter?
USB Id?
USB bridge (if known)?
Smartctl command lines used on Linux and Windows?

Please provide smartctl -r ioctl,2 -x ... outputs from Linux and Windows using same adapter and drive. Add -d ... if required. Don't past outputs to comments, use attachments instead.

Version 0, edited 4 years ago by Christian Franke (next)
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