AD64 is not coming up

[phadobas]

Last night the thing froze. I gave it a reboot. The server was un-responsive completely and I had to hold in power button to turn off the server. It came up but the voicemail service was "starting" for over an hour. I cancelled that, gave a proper reboot to the server and tried again, but still the service didn't start up in over an hour.
Then I stopped it again, made a backup copy of the c:\vmail folder, and then issued the "voiceserver dbchk /f" command. It ran for about an our, looks like it did its thing.
Now I'm starting the voiceserver service again, and so far it's been "starting" for 10 minutes.

I went through this whole thing over a year ago, at which time I just re-installed the whole thing on a new server from scratch. At that time the hard drive was so old that it took me 2 days to rescue my backup file from it. Eventually I managed and everything came back up.

This time I'm not intending to spend another 2 days on re-installing from scratch. Any experience or advice?

 

[belevedere]

If you are motivated into restoring it again, I'd look into HDD's without moving parts. However, you don't need anyone here to tell you that it's end of life, end of support and time to buy a new VM server. AVST is probably the best replacement for the NEC systems. I believe they have plug in's that replicate the operation of the older Active Voice platform, which will make it easier for the users.

 

[phadobas]

Ok, so after 1.5hrs, it came up. I'm backing up the whole thing now (doing a full ONLINE backup). Yes, I know it's beyond its supported lifetime. Will check into other options.

 

[belevedere]

Do the usual HDD clean up and maintenance. I'd also clean up any old messages that might be taking up valuable HDD space.

 

[magugpo]

I have same issue with our AD64 a year ago. My company doesn't want to spend money on this expensive server (after new system estimate) and of it's EOL. I have to do my own voicemail build using an inexpensive cisco 2800 router with CME, configure my PABX PRI card and connect it to the router. If you want to keep that AD64, follow Belevedere's suggestion to do maintenance more often.

 

[phadobas]

Thank you. Looks like I'm sticking with AD64 for a while longer.
Last night I did a test and stopped the voice server process, which took about 2 minutes to stop. Then I started it and it came up in about 30 seconds. That gives me some releif.
So yes, in the next maintenance window, I'll shut down the process, do disk maintenance and fire up the process again.
Looks like the problem arose when I forcefully had to power down the whole server (not just the process), without going through the proper procedure.