BCM 200 VM offline

[jeaumag]

I have a BCM 200 with PRI and digital handset modules. Callpilot went down a few days ago and F981 responds service not available and VM never picks up on unanswered incoming calls. Also, the PBX dropped off the network so I cannot remotely access it. Multiple reboots of the PBX have not corrected the problem.

At boot time the hard drive indicator flashes for a few seconds at about the time the boot "beep" sounds but goes dark and remains dark the rest of the time. There are no red/amber LEDs (the amber activity light on the LAN port excepted) on the front panel.

Based on recommendations on this forum I pulled the hard drive and attached it as a slave drive to a PC and I see numerous partitions all of which report as healthy on Windows XP. I'm not sure this is normal but there are 6 partitions reporting as NTFS.

So does this mean the HD is ok and it's the base function tray that is toast? Any help is appreciated!

 

[Firebird Scrambler]

Check your Motherboard capacitors are OK and not distorted or leaking. I guess that it's still the hard disk that has a fault. Connect up a serial cable onto the BCM as shown in the attached guide.

Also give the BCM a good clean and check out all the connections are sound.

http://www.ghtrout.com/files/Replacing_a_BCM_3_6_or_4_0_hard_drive.zip

All the best

Firebird Scrambler
Meridian 1 / Succession and BCM / Norstar Programmer in the UK

http://www.linkedin.com/in/davidbromley

If it's working, then leave it alone!.

 

[jeaumag]

Firebird Scrambler,

First off thanks for the detailed and prompt response!

Caps look good. I'm going to have to buy a USB to Serial adapter--none of our laptops support serial anymore!

As far as your excellent instructions--is that just a new, empty hard drive I use that is at least as large as the original? No formatting needed?

 

[jeaumag]

Update:

* I noticed when I hooked up the BCM hard drive to my PC that the PC OS wanted to chkdsk the drive. Accidentally (damned multitasking) I rebooted the PC and didn't catch it in time and the chkdsk ran. By the time I noticed it was well on its way so I figured the damage was done (or undone as the case may be) and just let it finish. It "fixed" a lot of stuff but maybe it really was completely garbling the disk as far as the BCM was concerned. When I hook the "fixed" disk back up to the BCM 200 the behavior is the same--at the same time the boot beep sounds the hard disk light flashes a couple of pulses and then goes dark for good.

* I decided to try an experiment (since I couldn't take the BCM down due to business hours usage) and cloned the BCM disk using a bare-metal cloning software package. The clone ran to completion with no complaints--so does this imply no bad sectors? The cloned disk acts the same as the original BCM disk when hooked up to the PBX.

* I now have a USB to Serial adapter (but no easy way to test that works since I have nothing that's serial except the BCM!). Hooked it up to the BCM and I get nothing. No response when I connect and hit return, no output when the BCM boots (yes, I'm connected according to hyperterminal using the settings Firebird Scrambler kindly provided). This means I cannot proceed with FS's instructions since that requires accessing the BCM via the serial port.

* The indicators in the upper left (I assume these are driven by the base function tray) where the hard drive indicator is behave as follows (on = green, off = dark): power on, hard drive flashes at boot but then off, nortel symbol all the way to lan 2 all flash in a rapid (maybe 2 Hz) steady pattern, temp and fan on solid, the last one on the right that looks like a transistor symbol is off. As previously stated, the modules plugged into the BCM all have normal LED indicators and the BCM functions as a basic phone system without VM or any of the fancy features.

Obviously I'm no expert but it certainly is looking to my uneducated eye as if the base function tray is the problem--else wouldn't I be able to open a serial communication with it?

Given that there are at least three cards that make up the main unit of the BCM (the main board, the daughter board riser, the daughter board itself) I begin to wonder what to order as a replacement.

 

[telcodog]

We've seen this hundreds of times over the years! Your hard drive is fried! Just get a replacement from an Avaya dealer and replace it.

If you can get your hands on an image CD, you could get a blank drive and re-image it yourself but those old 20Mb drives are getting hard to find.

The reason that the system telephony is working is because that info is loaded onto the MSC card and will stay there until you re-initialize the system (like when you put in a new drive). All other applications are run directly from the hard drive. That's why your voicemail is not accesible or why you can't access the system via the serial port. There's a whole host of services that are stored on the hard drive and must be loaded into memory before they can be used. If the drive isn't booting up, then those services cannot be run. Only telephony will continue to operate after reboots because the program is resident on the MSC card.

 

[jeaumag]

I've been waiting for parts and got the first one today from eBay. It's a full base function tray complete with everything but the modules (i.e. there's a hard drive, power supply, case).

First I powered it up and it the hard drive indicator certainly behaves differently from my failed BCM 200: it flickers at boot and then shows lots of activity as the device boots up and loads.

Next I plugged my hard drive from the failed BCM into this new BFT and it behaves like it did with the new hard drive that came with the new BCM. Lots of activity. The only catch is the BCM appears to reboot over and over. I'm not sure if that's because the old BCM was at 3.7 and the new at 3.6, the lack of the modules that the old/failed BCM had, or what.

But doesn't this make one think that it's the old BFT that is bad and not the old hard drive?

I'm still waiting on a hard drive that's configured with 3.7 on it.

 

[jeaumag]

I'm trying to be careful, as I work through the repair process, and I don't want to lose anything I don't have to. I've already imaged my hard drive but I was wondering--is there anyway to make an exact duplicate of whatever configuration my BCM is running on right now? Would I somehow duplicate the thing that looks like a compact flash card? Just trying to be cautious.

 

[jeaumag]

Finally got serial communications working! I literally had to break out the multimeter and soldering iron to get a functional null modem cable working but now I can watch the new system I got from eBay boot up with all the service starting messages.

I stand corrected about my old hard drive--while the lights flicker differently on the new system there is no output on the serial interface so I conclude that that hard drive is, indeed, toast.