February 11th, 2009 | 
Author: RAID (Redundant Array of Independent Disks) is a high performance data storage system that gives high level of storage flexibility and large data volume sizes. RAID server can store a large amount of data on a single system and offers complete safety of your data.
Though, RAID arrays carry large storage capacity with special hard drives, but over a certain period of time they go out of space as in large organizations. Then we have to increase the storage capacity. You can do this by expanding RAID array.
A RAID array could be expanded by adding new hard drives to it. It should be done by a Backup Operator or ideally a Storage Administrator. In general, mostly logical and rarely physical errors may lead to data loss when you expand a RAID array.
For instance, while expanding a RAID 5 array using Novell NetWare, if newly added hard drive fails during restripe, it is judged as a fault and the storage device and all its pools are automatically deactivated.
When the same partition becomes online again, it completes the restripe operation. But if the partitions could not become online, you have to re-create the RAID array of desired size and must recover data from backup.
o To avoid the data loss, you should always create proper backup of all your RAID 5 NetWare data before expanding it.
In case if you do not have proper backup and you are experiencing the above situation, you need to carry out Novell Recovery. It is the process of extracting data from failed Novell hard drives.
It is possible with the help of Novell Partition Recovery software. These are third party applications, which are capable of extracting your lost, missing and inaccessible data from Novell Netware based hard drives in most of the data loss situations.
Stellar Phoenix Novell Data Recovery is the most efficient and result oriented Novell Recovery tool that comes equipped with powerful scanning mechanisms. It supports Novell Partition Recovery from NWFS and NSS file system volumes. With interactive user interface and rich graphical support, Phoenix Novell Data Recovery software is the best solution for Novell Recovery.
K Madhav is a student of Mass Communication doing research on File Recovery Software.
He is also a freelancer for Stellar Information System Ltd.
Article Source: Novell Data Loss While Expending RAID 5 Array
