Acronis® Drive Monitor User's Guide
Copyright © Acronis, Inc., 2000-2010. All rights reserved. “Acronis” and “Acronis Secure Zone” are registered trademarks of Acronis, Inc. "Acronis Compute with Confidence", “Acronis Startup Recovery Manager”, “Acronis Active Restore” and the Acronis logo are trademarks of Acronis, Inc. Linux is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds. VMware and VMware Ready are trademarks and/or registered trademarks of VMware, Inc. in the United States and/or other jurisdictions.
Table of contents 1 Introduction ..........................................................................................................................4 1.1 What is Acronis® Drive Monitor? ..............................................................................................4 1.2 About S.M.A.R.T. parameters ....................................................................................................4 1.3 System requirements and supported media .......................................
1 Introduction 1.1 What is Acronis® Drive Monitor? Acronis Drive Monitor is a free tool available for public download, created to increase customer awareness about the health of their disk drives and to encourage them to back up their data in order to survive a disk failure. 1.2 About S.M.A.R.T. parameters Self-Monitoring, Analysis, and Reporting Technology, or S.M.A.R.T., is a standard technology, which allows automatical monitoring of a hard disk drive’s health.
1.3 1.3.1 System requirements and supported media Minimum system requirements The hardware requirements of Acronis Drive Monitor correspond to the minimum requirements for the operating system installed on the computer to be used for running Acronis Drive Monitor. In addition Acronis Drive Monitor requires the following hardware: 1024 MB RAM Processor Pentium 1 GHz or faster Mouse or other pointing device (recommended). 1.3.
2 Acronis Drive Monitor installation and startup 2.1 Installing Acronis Drive Monitor To install Acronis Drive Monitor: Run the Acronis Drive Monitor setup file. In the Install Menu, click on the Install Acronis Drive Monitor to launch the installation procedure. Follow the install wizard instructions on the screen. Read and accept the Acronis Drive Monitor license agreement. To make sure there is enough of free space for installing Acronis Drive Monitor, click Disk usage...
To make sure there is enough of free space for extracting and installing Acronis Drive Monitor, click Disk usage... button, which opens a window with a list of hard drives and their disk space usage information. Click Close to return to the install wizard. Click Extract. 2.3 Running Acronis Drive Monitor You can run Acronis Drive Monitor in Windows by selecting Start → Programs → Acronis → Acronis Drive Monitor → Acronis Drive Monitor or by clicking on the appropriate shortcut on the desktop. 2.
When all your disks are being monitored and no hardware problems were detected, the status icon on the right will show OK status. This section may also reflect a warning message in case there are disks, which are not monitored. Click Show disks link to go to a Disks page, where you can view for more detailed information, enable/disable monitoring and change other settings if required. Backup The Backup section informs you whether your data is protected with recently created backup archives.
Available disks The table displays all disks in your computer. It reflects brief details about manufacturer and model, capacity, volumes and common health status. The colored health status reflection makes it easier to recognize at-a-glance which disk may be at risk. When a health status decreases, look at the S.M.A.R.T. parameters' values to research where a problem may appear. By default the first hard disk is selected and its details are displayed in the table.
Disk temperature The hard disk temperature in displayed in Centigrade or Fahrenheit depending on your settings. 3.2.2 S.M.A.R.T. parameters This tab contains a table with S.M.A.R.T. parameters, available for our hard drive (this list depends on the hardware manufacturer). Each line shows the parameter name, its current value, threshold (the lowest limit set by the manufacturer) and the common status. You may right-click any column name to view and change values to be displayed in the table.
Reset to default - select this item to cancel all changes you have made before (ignored parameters, changed Raw offset values). 3.2.3 Events The Events tab contains a table with event logs. It shows which S.M.A.R.T. parameter has changed, its previous and new values. Double click will open a window with the detailed information on the event. 3.2.
Disk health (%) = Π (100% - (min(limit, attribute_value*Weight))) where: 100% - an initial health of a disk; Π - the product of minimums from (limit, attribute_value*Weight) - calculated for each critical S.M.A.R.T. parameter; Weight - a weight of each critical S.M.A.R.T. parameter (see a Table 1 below); limit - a limit of each critical S.M.A.R.T. parameter (see a Table 1 below); attribute_value - a current parameter's value. Example: 1.
Attribute ID S.M.A.R.T.
1 - electromechanical problems occurred, the disk needs to be checked to avoid possible failure in the future; 2 - error: there is serious problem with the disk, it needs urgent data backup and, probably, hardware replacement. Below is a sample of a custom script applicable for Intel(R) RAID controllers using Intel(R) CmdTool2 v5.00.11: @echo off setlocal echo Sample ADM custom script for Intel(R) RAID controllers using Intel(R) CmdTool2 v5.00.
echo Critical disks: %%d set /a critical_disks=%%d ) ) if %%a==Failed ( if %%b==Disks ( echo Failed disks: %%d set /a failed_disks=%%d ) ) ) echo. echo Physical devices information echo.
if %%a==Media ( set /a error_count+=%%d echo Media error count: %%d ) if %%a==Other ( set /a error_count+=%%d echo Other error count: %%d echo. ) ) echo *** echo.
if %error_count% gtr 4 ( echo Alert! Errors found on some devices! set /a ret_code=%ret_code_critical% ) else ( if %error_count% neq 0 ( echo Warning! Errors found on some devices! set /a ret_code=%ret_code_warning% ) else ( echo All devices are running normally set /a ret_code=%ret_code_ok% ) ) echo exiting with return code %ret_code% exit %ret_code% If you have any questions concerning custom scripts, please refer to Acronis Discussion Forums. 3.3 Backup Although S.M.A.R.T.
Backup software is available: If a backup software is available on your computer, the table below shows a list of existing disks/partitions, creation time of the last backup of this disk/partition and its status (succeeded or failed). Clicking Configure backup monitoring link will lead you to the Options (p. 21) page, where you can enable/disable backup monitoring behavior.
You may disable notifications about unavailable backups, thus they will not be displayed on the Summary page. 3.4 Critical events Acronis Drive Monitor informs you in case of a dangerous event and allows viewing its working logs. Critical events page displays only potentially dangerous events for data safety caused by changes of critical parameters.
Event details window Event details page shows all data and description concerning the selected event. Up and down arrow buttons ont the right allow moving up and down in the list of events not quiting back to the main program area. In the bottom of the page there is a link to an Acronis Knowledge Base web site. To provide you the better and early support, our team needs the complete system information. To send the details you need to confirm the feedback. 3.4.
= 3,
You may receive messages when a critical event/warning appears. Such messages will be sent when a problem occurs, and no new alerts will be sent until a system status is restored to OK, or a problem becomes more serious for the disk. This option is enabled by default. You may receive regular disk status reports with specified periodicity (see Regular reports schedule (p. 23) section for details). Acronis Drive Monitor allows running monitoring process in the background.
Click OK to save changes and return to the Options page. 3.5.1.2 Regular reports schedule You can specify a schedule for regular disk status reports. Such report contains all information on your disks, including a monitoring mode, health, temperature, S.M.A.R.T. parameters degradation, if any, and detected alerts. Acronis Drive Monitor also will inform you about the hard drive failure, that may occur soon. The second part of the report will contain results of Windows event log monitoring.
To specify the events, which you want to be informed about, you can change the monitoring configuration - see Critical Events monitoring configuration (p. 20) article. Clicking Reset to the original settings link will reset exclude filters, that were specified in winlog_filter.xml (all user's changes will be lost; to return filtering back, you will have to change the file manually), so after confirming this, messages about all critical events will be listed in the table. 3.5.
R 4 Index Regular reports schedule • 22, 23 A Removing Acronis Drive Monitor • 7 About S.M.A.R.T. parameters • 4, 7 S Acronis Drive Monitor installation and startup • 6 Running Acronis Drive Monitor • 7 S.M.A.R.T.
