Certify Failed: Understanding and Resolving Certification Errors
When you certify disks, they should ALWAYS pass a certify. If you get any certify error, you know for certain there is a hardware error. Understanding the exact cause can be somewhat complex. Here are steps to perform when you get a certify error:
Your disk has encountered a certification failure, indicating a potential hardware issue. Follow these steps to diagnose and address the problem:
Possible Causes:
Launch SoftRAID, and in the utilities menu, select the SoftRAID Log.
Scroll down to the bottom (you can also use the filter in the upper right type certify to only show lines that contain certify)
1) Communication Error:
Diagnosing:
Action:
2) Faulty Disk:
Diagnosing:
Action:
Note: If the disk has “unreliable sectors”, you may want to restart the certify, as it may have been caused by a communications problem, however if any sectors subsequently are marked “reallocated”, then replace the drive.
Type A, the disk error points to a specific sector, or type B, the disk error points to “sector 0”, which can be a communications error.
Type A: Replace the disk.
Type B: Investigate possible bus communication issues, whether this was a communications error (loose cable, disk ejected, etc, (Section 1) rather than an actual disk failure. Resume certification, after checking connections.
Examples:
Type A: “Dec 12 14:54:35 – SoftRAID Driver: A disk for the volume “ThunderBlade” (disk10) encountered a read error (E00002CD). The disk (disk6, SoftRAID ID: 09B2D04656CF4B00) was unable to read sectors. The error occurred at volume offset 4706153693184 (i/o block size 3145728). This disk should be replaced.”
Type B: ” Jun 04 03:17:52 – SoftRAID Driver: A disk for the volume “ThunderBlade” (disk10) encountered a read error (E00002CD). The disk (disk6, SoftRAID ID: 09B2D04656CF4B00) was unable to read sectors. The error occurred at volume offset 0 (i/o block size 3145728). This disk should be replaced.”
3) Faulty Enclosure:
Diagnosing:
Action: