As discussed here, I've been working to load a great many smaller disks' data to a larger storage repository. The system in question is Fedora Core Server 31 - out just a week ago or less. Of course, I added a few tools to the base Server download including Gnome, gnome-disks, and gparted, because these are all handy.
Everything worked as expected regarding working with the disks via a combination of command line and graphical tools, and I managed to process maybe a dozen disks, salvaging what data they could contribute to our effort, up until a point which is the basis if this question.
Prior to this moment, I was able to get SMART data from all disks via gnome-disks, including a few IDE drives (as I recall) and I managed to salvage a LOT of data from ancient drives.
But at some point gnome-disks quit providing an option to select / fetch the SMART data from the drives (anything but the system disk) , simply greying-out the option to fetch SMART data, and providing an orange-square base for its graphical display (which was normally a different, non-orange color). As everything else was functional, I ignored the loss of data about the drive's hours of service, whether the assessment was "OK" and so on...
Unfortunately, it got worse. At some point I did a reboot, thinking it would help, but no, things got worse. Now gnome-disks only provides an empty screen with the only content being "Select a device". ... It presents exactly zero choices, not even the obviously available system disk.
Puzzling, though, is that gparted is capable of displaying all the disks, and by using it, I've been able to see what partitions exist and have easily mounted them, and done some other work. So, why can gparted see these disks and gnome-disks can not? And, What do I do about it? Until I get a good answer, I'm back to the command-line-only environment (not that I'm uncomfortable with it - I've only been doing this work since 1977, long before graphical tools became available), or, I back-pedal and install a younger version of Fedora (or some other release entirely, perhaps - your comments on that are welcome).
Any help / insight appreciated.
UPDATE:
First, an additional reboot cured the "Select a device" problem reported above.
Next up, as indicated above, I went to command-line tools and regarding a drive that gnome-disks sees but won't give SMART data for and which shows the disk as an orange square, I used smartctl -i and proved that the drive is fine and, vitally, SMART support is both enabled and available, though it did say the drive was not in the smartctl database. (That didn't seem to stop gnome-disks BEFORE the glitch - this same drive displayed properly previously.)
Here's an excerpt of the smartctl dialogue:
# smartctl -i /dev/sdb
smartctl 7.0 2019-03-31 r4903 [x86_64-linux-5.3.7-301.fc31.x86_64] (local build)
Copyright (C) 2002-18, Bruce Allen, Christian Franke, www.smartmontools.org
=== START OF INFORMATION SECTION ===
Device Model: ST14000NM0018-2H4101
Serial Number: xxxxxx
LU WWN Device Id: xxxxxx
Firmware Version: SN02
User Capacity: 14,000,519,643,136 bytes [14.0 TB]
Sector Sizes: 512 bytes logical, 4096 bytes physical
Rotation Rate: 7200 rpm
Form Factor: 3.5 inches
Device is: Not in smartctl database [for details use: -P showall]
ATA Version is: ACS-4 T13/BSR INCITS 529 revision 5
SATA Version is: SATA 3.3, 6.0 Gb/s (current: 6.0 Gb/s)
Local Time is: Sun Nov 3 15:51:43 2019 PST
SMART support is: Available - device has SMART capability.
SMART support is: Enabled
...I'm guessing it's time to report a bug? Hmmm...
0 Answers