How to download and install

There are different ways to get and install smartmontools. You can use any of the procedures below. The INSTALL file contains additional information.

  1. Install precompiled package
    (Instructions)
    1. Debian package
      (Instructions)
    2. Redhat package
      (Instructions)
    3. Other Linux distributions with RPM
      (Instructions)
    4. Cygwin package
      (Instructions)
      (Windows with extLink: Cygwin installed)
    5. Windows package
      (Instructions)
  2. Install from our source tarball
    (Instructions)
  3. Install latest unreleased code from SVN repository
    (Instructions)
  4. Don't install, run from Live-system
    (Instructions)

Smartmontools 5.38 (stable) was released 2008/03/10, see NEWS and CHANGELOG for details.


After installation or booting from a Live-CD, you can read smartmontools man pages and try out the commands:

man smartd.conf
man smartctl
man smartd

# Only root can do this
/usr/sbin/smartctl -s on -o on -S on /dev/hda
/usr/sbin/smartctl -a /dev/hda

Note that the default location for the manual pages are /usr/share/man/man5 and /usr/share/man/man8.  If 'man' doesn't find them, then you may need to add /usr/share/man to your MANPATH environment variable.

The Windows package provides preformatted man pages in *.html and *.txt format.


First Method - Install precompiled package

Starting with smartmontools release 5.37, RPM files are no longer available at the smartmontools project download page. Refer to the package download location of your distribution.






Second Method (Linux/Solaris/FreeBSD/NetBSD/OpenBSD/Cygwin) - Install from the source tarball

Third Method - Install latest unreleased code from SVN repository

We moved from CVS to a Subversion (SVN) repository. The new address for our repository is https://smartmontools.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/smartmontools

Fourth Method - Don't install, run from Live-system

If you have a system that is showing signs of disk trouble (for example, it's unbootable and the console is full of disk error messages) it can be handy to have a version of smartmontools that can be run off of a bootable CD or floppy to examine the disk's SMART data and run self-tests. This is also useful if you want to run Captive Self-Tests (the -C option of smartctl ) on disks that can not easily be unmounted, such as those hosting the Operating System files. Or you can use this to run smartctl on computers that don't use Linux as the day-to-day operating system.

Here is a list of such bootable CDs:

Please let us know if there are others, and we will add them to this list.


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