palimpsest / gnome-disk-utility stopped working normally from recently - incorrectly says that "SMART is not available" !!

[chanakyakv]

Binary package hint: gnome-disk-utility

Palimpsest Disk Utility / gnome-disk-utility was working fine atleast until 15 days ago. I often used to check my hard disk working temperature in palimpsest.

But now it says "SMART is not available" !! SMART feature hasn't been changed or disabled in BIOS. Other SMART applications seems to be working fine in Windows (I have both Windows and Linux installed on my laptop).

Its hard to guess what has changed in 15 days which has rendered palimpsest not to work normally as it used to work. The only thing I can think of is that I updated using update-manager a week ago (which I usually do once in a week). I don't know whether palimpsest was updated or any other dependent packages of palimpsest was updated; which could have caused this problem.

Please look into this and give a solution.

Also, many people seem to have encountered this problem recently as this thread says:
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?p=9059609

ProblemType: Bug
Architecture: i386
Date: Thu Apr 1 18:30:14 2010
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 9.10
InstallationMedia: Ubuntu 9.10 "Karmic Koala" - Release i386 (20091028.5)
NonfreeKernelModules: wl
Package: gnome-disk-utility 2.28.0+git20091012-0ubuntu1
ProcEnviron:
 PATH=(custom, no user)
 LANG=en_IN
 SHELL=/bin/bash
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 2.6.31-20.58-generic
SourcePackage: gnome-disk-utility
Uname: Linux 2.6.31-20-generic i686
XsessionErrors:
 (gnome-settings-daemon:2013): GLib-CRITICAL **: g_propagate_error: assertion `src != NULL' failed
 (gnome-settings-daemon:2013): GLib-CRITICAL **: g_propagate_error: assertion `src != NULL' failed
 (polkit-gnome-authentication-agent-1:2115): GLib-CRITICAL **: g_once_init_leave: assertion `initialization_value != 0' failed
 (nautilus:2106): Eel-CRITICAL **: eel_preferences_get_boolean: assertion `preferences_is_initialized ()' failed
 (firefox:2679): GLib-WARNING **: g_set_prgname() called multiple times

[Chris Coulson (chrisccoulson)]

Thank you for your bug report. However, this is intentional as a workaround for bug 445852, and is explained in the changelog for the last devicekit-disks upload (which should have been viewable in update-manager when you updated):

devicekit-disks (007-2ubuntu6) karmic-proposed; urgency=low

  * Add 11-disable-smart-probing.patch: Disable ATA SMART probing on ATA
    disks. It causes hardware damage to a lot of SSD disks. This is a
    workaround, until a real fix in libatasmart is found. (LP: #445852)
 -- Martin Pitt <<email address hidden> > Thu, 25 Mar 2010 18:47:35 +0100

See https://edge.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/devicekit-disks/007-2ubuntu6

[Joe le Kiffeur (joelekiffeur)]

I confirm this problem on HDD.

Please detect if HDD or SDD before to configure devicekits-kits, because it seems several HDD users has the same problem.

Thanks. :)

[Chris Coulson (chrisccoulson)]

Please see my last comment.

Adding checks for HDD/SSD is fairly unlikely to happen as a SRU for karmic, but SMART may be re-enabled again once the libatasmart bug is fixed (bug 445852)

[Exquisite Dead Guy (ben-forlent)]

Sorry if this is a dumb question, but for those of us without any SSD disks is there a way to manually re-enable the SMART monitoring?

[taughm (taughm)]

I am not sure I understand - it seems that the functionality of the utility has been entirely lost for a large class of users in order to fix a hardware problem for another class of users. While it's well intentioned (assuming the utility was causing damage to the hardware, even for a small group of users), I am not sure that this approach should constitute a fix.

IMO, this bug needs to remain open.

[Sam_ (and-sam)]

Chris,
it's available in Lucid, why is it then "invalid" in Karmic?

[eyrieowl (eyrieowl)]

This was a really ham-handed "workaround". The percentage of users with SSDs has got to be under 1%, and to help them, you're going to risk the rest of your users losing data b/c they thought their system was monitoring their drive health and now it's not? Seems pretty stupid to me, but what do I know.... I only noticed this because I have a drive I thought might be going on the fritz, and went into palimpset to look at it, noticed no smart on ANY of my drives, and started digging. At the very least, the installation of the patch which disables SIGNIFICANT data safeguards should have caused a few flashing lights and, say, a dialogue which asks me if I actually have an SSD or am even thinking about SSD.