Appeal No. 2006-0570 3
Application No. 09/706,960
examiner, Reynolds discloses a “special flag” to determine whether a fail-safe mode is to
be established in response to a previous failure.
The examiner concludes that it would have been obvious to use a flag to initiate
recovery because Halladay’s abstract makes it clear that automation is important and
Reynolds discloses that it is desirable to automate the boot disk process via automation,
citing column 2, lines 1-18.
Appellants contend that the combination is improper as there is no motivation to
make the combination. Appellants base this conclusion on Halladay’s disclosure of the
use of a floppy disk for “cold” booting a computer in response to a memory failure, finding
that it is the user who must initiate the cold boot process. Therefore, contend appellants,
there is no need to use a special flag since the loading of the floppy disk itself is the act for
starting the restoring process. Moreover, argue appellants, Reynolds is directed to
entering a fail-safe mode based on the special flag and is not concerned with restoring
data from a backup device in response to this special flag. Accordingly, appellants
conclude that there would have been no reason to employ the special flag of Reynolds in
the device of Halladay to start a backup process in response to that flag indicating a fault
has occurred with an operational element.
Still further, appellants assert that even if the combination was made, the instant
claimed subject matter would not result since the flag recited in claim 1 must indicate if a
fault has occurred with the first operational element and a backup device must enable
access to a network through an interface in response to the flag indicating failure of the
first operational element.
The examiner counters with an explanation of motivation to combine as follows
(answer-page 15): Halladay makes it clear that automation is important and specifically
discloses a boot disk as the means by which recovery is initiated; and Reynolds discloses
in the background section that boot disks are used to start up an “old-style character-
based operating system” (column 1, line 57). The examiner also asserts that Reynolds
discloses in the summary of the invention portion that the invention overcomes these
limitations of known systems by allowing the user to repair a GUI-based operating system
by providing automatic failure recovery through a special fail-safe mode (column 2, line
14). According to the examiner, this provides “two-way motivation to combine Halladay in
view of Reynolds” (answer-page 15).
Moreover, the examiner explains, at pages 15-16 of the answer, a flag is merely a
bit, or a Boolean indicator, which, in and of itself, has no inherent properties except for
being a 0 or a 1. Therefore, in accordance with the examiner’s thinking, the flag itself does
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