wiki:Download

Version 146 (modified by Christian Franke, 8 months ago) ( diff )

Drivedb branches 6.0-6.4 are no longer maintained

Smartmontools Download and Installation

Table of Contents

  1. Install precompiled package
    1. Install the Windows package
    2. Install the OSX/Darwin 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 7.4 was released 2023-08-01, see NEWS, ChangeLog and tickets for details.

Release files are signed with OpenPGP/GPG key ID FF3AEFF5, fingerprint: 0C95 77FD 2C4C FCB4 B9A5 9964 0A30 812E FF3A EFF5.
The public key block is available here: Trac Browser, SVN Repository, Key Servers (see the FAQ for older keys).


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 *.pdf format.


Install precompiled package

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


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 distributions.

Starting with smartmontools 5.43, the (32-bit) installer provides 32-bit and 64-bit executables. The 32-bit version of smartmontools usually works also on 64-bit versions of Windows except if the 32-bit subsystem is unavailable (e.g. 64-bit WinPE).

Virus scanners occasionally produce false positive virus reports for smartmontools executables or NSIS Installers. If this is the case on your system, please send a report to the smartmontools-support mailing list. This is not needed if the detection is also reported by VirusTotal.

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


Install the OSX/Darwin package

Download and run the latest smartmontools dmg image from here. More recent OS X test releases build from the SVN snapshots are available here.

Package provides Mach-O universal binary with 2 architectures (i386 and x86_64) and should work on any Intel based Mac.


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-6.5.tar.gz

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

  cd smartmontools-6.5
  ./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 be build from the source tarball (or from SVN) using the MinGW-w64 runtime. Build environments may be Cygwin or MSYS2, 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 have also CI builds.

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

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://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 https://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 https_proxy (lower case only), see the man pages of the tools for details.

The downloaded file is verified with OpenPGP/GPG key ID 721042C5 (release 6.6: DFD22559).

The public key block is included in the script. It is also available at Key Servers (release 6.6) but there is no need to import it into a local keyring.

The Windows package provides update-smart-drivedb.ps1 since 7.3. It reads the proxy configuration from system settings. Older releases provide update-smart-drivedb.exe.

The drivedb.h file can be viewed or downloaded (/chrome/common/download.png) using the Trac browser: 6.5, 6.6, 7.0-7.1, 7.2, 7.3-7.4, trunk.
The following branches are no longer maintained: 5.39, 5.40, 5.41, 5.42, 5.43, 6.0, 6.1, 6.2, 6.3, 6.4.


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.

Note: See TracWiki for help on using the wiki.