Re: FYI: strange libata EH lines in dmesg once after every bootup

[Mark Lord <lkml@rtr.ca>]

>>> > >the following happens every time after bootup, tested with freshly built
>>> > >2.6.18-rc1-mm2: 
>> > ..
>>> > >ata1.00: exception Emask 0x0 SAct 0x0 SErr 0x0 action 0x0
>>> > >ata1.00: tag 0 cmd 0xb0 Emask 0x1 stat 0x51 err 0x4 (device error)
>>> > >ata1: EH complete
>> > ..
>> > 
>> > Those are S.M.A.R.T. commands.
>> > 
>> > Either your drive does not support S.M.A.R.T.,
>> > or you have not enabled it it with smartctl
> 
> 
> This drive model surely supports S.M.A.R.T. but maybe support in the
> driver is still underway. I just did a 
> 
> # smartctl --device=ata --smart=on --offlineauto=off --saveauto=on -T permissive /dev/sdb
> 
> and this is what I got:
> 
> smartctl version 5.36 [i686-pc-linux-gnu] Copyright (C) 2002-6 Bruce Allen
> Home page is http://smartmontools.sourceforge.net/
> 
> === START OF ENABLE/DISABLE COMMANDS SECTION ===
> SMART Enabled.
> Error SMART Enable Auto-save failed: Input/output error
> Smartctl: SMART Enable Attribute Autosave Failed.
> 
> SMART Automatic Offline Testing Disabled.

Okay.  Most likely your drive doesn't support the autosave features.

Just do "smartctl -d ata -a /dev/sdb" to see what it does support,
and then change the system startup scripts to not issue any unsupported
commands -- that'll get rid of those harmless boot time error messages.

Cheers