Novell Netware Disks and Volumes
Novell Netware Disk Partioning
Netware hard disks comply with the IBM disk-partitioning standard, which states that a hard disk can hold a maximum of four physical partitions. This is true for both NSS and Traditional Netware file systems. Each Netware server must have a DOS partition on one of its hard drives. The DOS partition is the primary boot partition where server.exe is stored.
Within the four-partition restriction, a hard disk can have UNIX, LINUX or WINDOWS 2000/2003 partitions, multiple Netware partitions or free (unassigned) space. At least one physical partitions will be a Netware partition. Netware requires a SYS: volume, which is created automatically when Netware is installed. The SYS: volume does not have to be on the same disk as the DOS partition. A server can have several hard disks of course, each of which can be partitioned.
Netware 6 allows you to split physical Netware partitions into logical partitions, called partition segments. These segments can be Traditional partitions, NSS partitions, iSCSI partitions, or SBD partitions for clustering. All these appear to the user as partition objects. In order to comply with the four-partition limit, the partitions segments are all combined into a single NetWare partition as seen on the master boot record. Some partition variations are illustrated below.
Each partition contains a data area, where the file system resides, and can contain another data area, called the mirror object, which is used to manage mirroring. The entire NetWare partition, including both the data area and mirror object, is called the physical partition. The data area of the partition is called the logical partition.
If you do not use mirroring, the entire physical partition is the logical partition.
The logical partition contains the volume definition table (VDT) that tracks such volume information as volume name, volume size, and the location of volume segments on various network hard disks. The VDT is critical as without it you cannot access your disks, or find your data, so Netware maintains four copies of the VDT for fault tolerance. If a disk error occurs and one table is corrupted, the file system can detect and correct the error.
If in case your novell volumes gets corrupted and you are unable to access them, then you can try Recover Data Novell Data Recovery Software for recovering the data from corrupt novell disk and volumes.
