I'm still pretty new at Linux, and I'm using Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.
I've been researching on how to do this, and I did "rpm -qa|grep
smartmontools" which told me that I had "smartmontools-5.36-3.1.el5."
So, I already have it downloaded, but now I typed "smartctl -i /dev/hda"
and the following was my output:

smartctl version 5.36 [i686-redhat-linux-gnu] Copyright (C) 2002-6 Bruce
Allen
Home page is http://smartmontools.sourceforge.net/

=== START OF INFORMATION SECTION ===
Device Model: SONY CD-RW CRX230ED
Serial Number: [No Information Found]
Firmware Version: 4YS1
Device is: Not in smartctl database [for details use: -P showall]
ATA Version is: 5
ATA Standard is: Exact ATA specification draft version not indicated
Local Time is: Mon Jun 11 10:15:39 2007 EDT
SMART support is: Unavailable - Packet Interface Devices [this device:
CD/DVD] don't support ATA SMART
A mandatory SMART command failed: exiting. To continue, add one or more
'-T permissive' options.

That end part is saying that it is unavailable...Any help would be much appreciated. Thanks

Are you sure your hard drive is hda? smartctl reports that it is a CD-RW...first confirm which device node your your hard drive is using (hdb, hdc etc). Smartmontools is primarily used for hard drives and not for optical drives. That is probably the reason why you don't see anything in that output.

yeah, I found out its sda, but it still doesn't work. Now I got:

In Linux, SATA disks accessed via libata are only supported by smartmontools
for kernel versions 2.6.15 and above. Try an additional '-d ata' argument.

And I already added "-d ata" so now I'm going to try researching libata. I have these two:

/usr/src/kernels/2.6.18-8.el5-i686/include/linux/libata.h
/usr/lib/openssl/engines/libatalla.so

but I have to find out if that is them or not. If not, I'm lost again