smartmontools on external hdd

[Björn Schöpe <bjoern.schoepe@gmx.de>]

Hi!
I've already posted here on behalf of my problems with an external 
scsi-hdd, but still I did not resolve it.
Today, after a system re-installation I installed smartmontools again to 
check the external hdd. I have done it before and everything worked 
fine, but today I got the output that smart is not supported:

Aemilia:/home/bjosch# smartctl -i /dev/sda
smartctl version 5.32 Copyright (C) 2002-4 Bruce Allen
Home page is http://smartmontools.sourceforge.net/

Device: Genesys  USB to IDE Disk Version: 0002
Device type: disk
Local Time is: Mon Apr 11 13:06:41 2005 CEST
Device does not support SMART

I tried to enable it (I thought, this might be the problem because I 
remember that I run smartmontools a couple of times on this hdd):

Aemilia:/home/bjosch# smartctl -s on /dev/sda
smartctl version 5.32 Copyright (C) 2002-4 Bruce Allen
Home page is http://smartmontools.sourceforge.net/

unable to fetch IEC (SMART) mode page [unsupported field in scsi command]
A mandatory SMART command failed: exiting. To continue, add one or more 
'-T permissive' options.

If the hdd supported once smart and now no longer, might this indicate 
that there is a hardware problem? Has anybody experienced something 
similar with smartmontools or can give me some advice?
Thanks.
-Bjoern.


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