Installed the addin the normal way, restarted the console, saw the icon in the toolbar but it crashed or something? I have 3x 2TB Hitachi and they show up correctly under the WHS storage tab.
I am using a RAID controller card made by 3ware. Do I need to install the controller drivers?
Try a system reboot?
I am having a similar problem "WMI Worker Process Encountered an exception : Not supported".
Should I install newer SATA drivers or change my disk configuration mode to SATA legacy, I think it is set to AHCI in the BIOS.
Please advise
Snoogle...it shouldn't matter if you're using a RAID controller. The add-in should display *something*, even if only a single disk appears (i.e. \\.\PHYSICALDRIVE0). If you have hardware RAID set up, chances are that Home Server SMART will see only one disk.
The add-in uses standard out-of-the-box Microsoft WMI calls. Win32_DiskDrive gives all the information that appears in the top two panels (physical disk list and details); MSStorageDriver_AtapiSmartData, MSStorageDriver_FailurePredictThresholds and MSStorageDriver_FailurePredictStatus generate SMART data. Unfortunately these three WMI methods only provide a full set of useful data for PATA/SATA disks. USB, FireWire and RAID sets don't provide this, although some limited data (true/false) is usually available via the FailurePredictStatus.
The fact that NOTHING is appearing for you is a surprise, and most likely a bug. Do you get an error message like the one mojo is getting?
Mojo...the message "not found" is often pretty ambiguous; WMI error messages are often pretty bland. Oftentimes you get something like "not found" or "not supported," which doesn't provide much insight. Usually "not found" means you're calling a nonexistent method, whereas "not supported" means that "the feature or operation is not supported" (from MS documentation).
That said, I'd like to try to determine WHERE this problem is occurring, since according to Microsoft all of the aforementioned WMI queries are valid in Windows Server 2003 (the WHS OS). In fact, before I released the software, I had to cull out a couple of physical disk attributes because they weren't available in Server 2003.
Can you send me a screen cap? Ideally I'd like to see the contents of the Physical Disk Details panel too (scroll it down as far as it will go). If an error is detected while populating that panel, it stops populating so it'll be partially populated--but it'll make it easy to narrow it down to which attribute(s) could be causing the issue.
Best regards,
Matt
This problem seems to be related to WMI itself, and not Home Server SMART. If I run these WMI commands in PowerShell, they work...except on some computers I get the WMI error "not supported." Unfortunately the MSStorageDriver class and subclasses are poorly documented, and there's not much good information on the "not supported" error either.
I have two separate posts out there, so if there are any WMI experts, please check these two items and if you know a solution, please let me know. In the meantime, I'll keep digging into it. I've included some screen caps from PowerShell.
http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/winserverManagement/thread/9c0156fa-7b60-4698-99a8-c2828125ffechttp://www.mediasmartserver.net/forums/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=6927
Best regards,Matt
I made a mistake with the error screen cap. I said "class" and not "namespace." Here's the correct one.
Snoogle & Mojo,
I think I've been able to shed some light on the subject. After beating on this in PowerShell, testing with various configurations, controllers, etc. here's what I've come up with. I'm thinking and hoping this is correct...at least it seems to be based on my observations.
It appears to me that if I run a query (i.e. "select * from MSStorageDriver_ATAPISmartData"), and results are returned (1 or more), then I can iterate through them.
However, if the query returns no results, one would think that you could query the count, and if it's zero, skip and move on. But even trying to query the Count object of the ManagementObject throws a "not supported" exception.
So off to PowerShell I went, and I basically found this...
If the MSStorageDriver_ATAPISmartData or MSStorageDriver_FailurePredictData (both SHOULD return data for PATA/SATA disks that are set up as "standalone" (non-RAID) disks. If they're SCSI, USB or FireWire--or PATA/SATA RAID, then they don't get included in the query results. If those are the only disks you have, the query will be empty (null) and thus will generate "not supported."
Likewise on my other WMI queries in MSStorageDriver, specifically _FailurePredictThresholds and _FailurePredictStatus. The former has the same restrictions as before...PATA/SATA non-RAID only. _FailurePredictStatus, however, does seem to work with USB, FireWire and SCSI disks. However, none of the items in MSStorageDriver seem to like hardware-based RAID arrays. I've already determined that a few different models of Dell PERC and Compaq Smart Array 4200 and 5300s all do NOT expose anything via the MSStorageDriver.
Despite this being more of a limitation of WMI, I am still going to log this into Home Server SMART as a bug, as there are certainly better ways I can handle this situation and report back to the user. It would be more useful, I think, to display an error message along the lines of, "Sorry, but Home Server SMART could not detect any drives that expose SMART data" or something similar.
Hi Matt,
Thanks for your detailed response and for making this addin. I appreciate it and I think that my problem is likely due to my system or RAID controller and not your addins fault. Maybe I need to try different drivers that expose this info to WMI ?Nonetheless I would really like to get SMART status information from my disks so I hope we can get it working.
I am at work right now but I can get you screenshots and logs or anything else you need. There was a popup but no text in it , also I forgot to say when everything is blank 2 times out of 5 it will totally lock the entire console and I have to do a session reset.
Snoogle,
I don't think there really is a way to report SMART data from a RAID volume. SMART is a function of each individual disk, whereas a RAID volume is a collection of disks.
Some manufacturers provide utilities that enable you to examine the status of individual drives within their RAID volumes, and this can include SMART data. However, to enable Home Server SMART to collect this data from various RAID controller manufacturers would require extensive knowledge of APIs, and the APIs may not even be public.
Unfortunately, for this reason, the likelihood of Home Server SMART being able to provide SMART data on individual disks in RAID volumes is extremely unlikely.
The best SMART monitoring software I've ever seen, HD Sentinel, doesn't even do much in the RAID support area. I think they support a very limited set of controllers. They do, however, get SMART data from quite a few USB disks through supported bridge chips, so this is something I'd like to take on sometime in the future, although I'm going to need to learn the USB mass storage protocol from the ground up.
I received a "Severe
WMI worker process encountered an exception: Object reference not set to an instance of an object." Warning.
Only showed 3 of 9 drives.
Asus P5Q motherboard
1 WD 640 black Sata
2 WD 1TB Green Sata on Motherboard
2 WD 2TB Green Sata " "
4 WD 1TB Green Sata on 2 Bytecc BT-PESAPA PCIe SATA II 300 + PATA Raid Cards (set at just a bunch of discs)
Eset nod 32
I too get the severe warning about the WMI worker process being not supported. I went to powershell and entered the following
Get-wmiobject -namespace "root/wmi" MSstoragedriver_ATAPIsmartdata
and I get a Get-WmiObject not supported at line 1 character 14
This is a BIOSTAR A760G M2+ motherboard with 3 SATA drives set as AHCI in the bios and a USB WD external drive attached. It shows no drives.
Steve
FWIW I fixed the WMI worker process encountered an exception: Not supported error message by uninstalling WHS Disk Management. Home Server SMART picked up all my disks right away.
Just tried that....NO GO for me. Still not working.
comptechltd: Just tried that....NO GO for me. Still not working.
Make sure you reset your Windows Home Server session, try restarting. Hope this helps as it worked for me.
Yep...already tried that too. WHS disk management picked up the info on the disks. I guess I'll reinstall it.