Appeal No. 1997-2242 Page 12
Application No. 08/084,370
[i]f one were to combine the teachings of Jones and
Ewert, the combination would simply yield a method
which allows defective units of data to be
recovered, remapped to a temporary storage area on
the same disk that contains the defective unit of
data and subse-quently unmapped and written to
either the original location on the same disk if it
was repairable or to a replacement disk; however,
such a solution would still be limited to moving
data to reserve areas or a replacement disk, so that
parity is maintained. Neither reference addresses
the problem which arises when an entire disk fails
and a replacement disk is not available.
In sum, neither Jones nor Ewert either alone or
in combination teaches or suggests reorganizing
chunks of data to form a fully folded array.
Because the solu-tions disclosed by the cited
references are geared towards maintaining parity and
do not suggest the type of modification necessary to
reliably operate an array with a completely bad
disk, obviousness is not estab-lished.
Appellant further asserts (brief, page 18) with regard to
claim 3 that
Jones and Ewert fail to disclose a method of
"unfolding" a fully folded RAID array or functional
equivalents thereof as claimed by the Applicant.
Instead, and as previously indicated, the Jones
method simply remaps sector data to reserve areas on
the same disk or rebuilds a disk in its entirety
onto a spare disk. Jones does not eliminate parity,
so there is never any need to restore it. The same
can be said of the Ewert reference. Ewert only
remaps tracks to reserve areas and subsequently
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