> I have two computers (Dell PowerEdge 400SC, the other homemade) and both of
> them have an SATA drives. Previously, the SATA drives were running in IDE
> emulation mode in the Bios, and SMART worked prefectly. They are now both
> running in native SATA mode, and SMART has stopped working :( The other IDE
> drive in the systems still reports info correctly with smartctl.
>
> Any ideas anyone?

From the smartmon faq: (http://smartmontools.sourceforge.net/#FAQ)

"Smartmontools should work correctly with SATA drives under both Linux 2.4 and 2.6 kernels, /if/ you use the standard IDE drivers in drivers/ide. If you use the new libata drivers, it won't work correctly because libata doesn't yet support the needed ATA-passthrough ioctl() calls. Jeff Garzik, the libata developer, says that this support will be added to libata in the future. When this happens, we'll add support to smartmontools for a new SATA/libata device type '-d sata'. Typically, to force an SATA disk to run using the standard (non-libata) drivers, you must use the BIOS to select "legacy mode" for the controller. If the IDE driver doesn't support your particular SATA controller, or the controller doesn't have a legacy interface, then only libata can be used. Unless the hard disk controller on the system motherboard is Intel, VIA or nVidia, standard IDE drivers may not work."

Note: an unofficial patch to libata that allows smartmontools to be used with the standard '-d ata' device type was posted to the linux kernel mailing list at the end of August 2004. The patch is included in the libata-dev patchset that can be applied to a recent Linux kernel (>= 2.6.9). With a SATA disk driven by a libata driver, smartmontools can now be used by specifying both the device type 'ata' and the SCSI device corresponding to this disk, for example, smartctl -i -d ata /dev/sda. The patch is still under development and it is probably best to make sure that the disk is idle before trying smartmontools.