Can anyone get SMARTVSD.VXD to work?
It is supposed to provide SMART monitoring for hard disks.

I can't get it to work with 98 SE SP 2.01 or after 98SE2ME (I didn't try unpatched Windows).

I turn SMART on in my BIOS, my hard disks are supported, and I see a nice message when I boot up. But inside Win 98 SE I can't get any SMART info. I tried three different apps - SpeedFan, HDD Health and Western Digitals' DataLifeGuard diagnose. The last two apps just constantly complain that SMARTVSD.VXD not installed even though its sitting in IOSUBSYS directory.

The VSD part stands for vendor specific, and I noticed that my file is 18 KB while there is also 9 KB and possibly other sizes available on the net. I tried a couple of versions and nothing worked.

SmartMonitoringTools

Hi azagahl,

I think I remember reading you are not using the standard IDE controller for your disks because of some hardware you have. Speed Fan and HDD Health both display SMART information for my two IDE drives but my SATA (SCSI) drive is not even listed by them. It seems SMART tools don't support SCSI drives.

Anyway I am not sure SMART technology is any accurate as no physical measurement is made on the drives. So far as I know, SMART technology has been develloped notably for accurately predicting the failure of high speed, always on, rotary pumps and thus be able to use them for the maximum possible period of time while never suffering an unexpected failure. This technology relies for making its predictions on acoustic and vibratory monitoring and analysis and takes into account the acoustic and vibratory environment of the measured object. Unless I am entirely wrong, no such measures are made on hard drives by SMART monitoring tools, everything being interpreted from disk events. So I suppose that after measurements have been made in a clean environment, algorythms have been written to equate hard disks event patterns with the vibratory state of a spining object. In a computer case, there are many spining objects, all resonating with each other so that a problem with a fan might translate in a false SMART warning on one or another of your drives or a real problem with a drive might not translate into a SMART warning because its vibratory symptoms are cancelled out by another object resonating with it. I believe that for satisfactorily using SMART monitoring tools on a computer hard drive, it recquires some tweaking of the box as to vibratorily isolate objects from each other.

you are not using the standard IDE controller for your disks because of some hardware you have.

Yes, I use IDE Miniport dirver which supports Ultra ATA disk speed + 48-bit LBA addressing for many VIA motherboards under Win 98 SE. You might be right, VIADSK.MPD might prevent SMART from working. FYI SmartmonTools seems to work under Mandriva LE 2005 x86_64.

Anyway I am not sure SMART technology is any accurate as no physical measurement is made on the drives.

SmartMonTools appears to report various stats such as disk age, number of errors, etc. Some drives support temperature measurements. Example:
SMART Attributes Data Structure revision number: 16
Vendor Specific SMART Attributes with Thresholds:
ID# ATTRIBUTE_NAME FLAG VALUE WORST THRESH TYPE UPDATED WHEN_FAILED RAW_VALUE
1 Raw_Read_Error_Rate 0x000b 200 200 051 Pre-fail Always - 0
3 Spin_Up_Time 0x0007 101 090 021 Pre-fail Always - 5700
4 Start_Stop_Count 0x0032 097 097 040 Old_age Always - 3014
5 Reallocated_Sector_Ct 0x0033 200 200 140 Pre-fail Always - 0
7 Seek_Error_Rate 0x000b 100 253 051 Pre-fail Always - 0
9 Power_On_Hours 0x0032 095 095 000 Old_age Always - 4231
10 Spin_Retry_Count 0x0013 100 100 051 Pre-fail Always - 0
11 Calibration_Retry_Count 0x0013 100 100 051 Pre-fail Always - 0
12 Power_Cycle_Count 0x0032 098 098 000 Old_age Always - 2949
196 Reallocated_Event_Count 0x0032 200 200 000 Old_age Always - 0
197 Current_Pending_Sector 0x0012 200 200 000 Old_age Always - 0
198 Offline_Uncorrectable 0x0012 200 200 000 Old_age Always - 0
199 UDMA_CRC_Error_Count 0x000a 200 253 000 Old_age Always - 2
200 Multi_Zone_Error_Rate 0x0009 200 200 051 Pre-fail Offline - 0

SMART Error Log Version: 1
No Errors Logged

SMART Self-test log structure revision number 1
Num Test_Description Status Remaining LifeTime(hours) LBA_of_first_error
# 1 Short captive Completed without error 00% 0 -

Device does not support Selective Self Tests/Logging

Try moving the SMARTVSD.VXD file from the IOSUBSYS folder into the \WINDOWS\SYSTEM\ folder, azagahl. Some SMART apps may work only if the SMARTVSD.VXD file is in the SYSTEM folder while others may want that VXD file in the IOSUBSYS folder. After moving the file there, restart the computer and see what happens.