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BCM 400 no power

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MrWeen

Technical User
Jun 1, 2006
10
CA
Hello,

Our BCM 400 has lost power today. There is only the 1 red light on in the front of the BCM. This has happened before and all I had to do was change the power supply. Today when I swapped power supplies it had no effect. I plugged it in and still no power was given to the BCM. Any suggestions on what the issue could be? The power supply I swapped in was brand new.

Thank you

MrWeen
 
Have you checked the Fan? I had one that did that but the fan was bad.
 
Thank you for the quick reply. Do you mean the fan on the power supply (nothing happens to it when I plug in the cord. I tested it in another system and it works fine) or the other fan that is in the BCM? If the BCM fan is not working would this make the entire BCM not power up?

Thank you,

Mrween
 
The Fan for the BCM, I do not know why but we had one that would not power up due to the BCM fan
 
I unplugged the fan from the board and tried plugging in the power supply again. Still no power. Do you think this is a good enough test to let me know it isn't the fan or should I go buy a new fan first before I eliminate that from the reasons for failure?

MrWeen
 
The problem is unplugging isn't going to make a difference. It doesn't see a fan at all.
 
Great. The fan looks like it's going to be hard to take out since it doesn't have any proper screws on it. Well I'm off to the store to buy another fan then to see what happens. I'll update once I have replaced it.

Anyone else have any other suggestions on what the problem could be?

MrWeen
 
I believe this is a three wire fan, Make sure the replacement does also.
 
I have had cases where a bad module can cause a system to seem like it would be a power supply. Remove all off your modules & try powering it on.
 
Tried the replacement fan. No change. Still no power.

When you say modules do you mean the PRI and such? Do you mean just pull out the power connectors to them or pull them out of the system all together?

Thank you,

MrWeen
 
I guess you could pull the power to the modules but it would be easier to just pull the modules like Cook1082 suggested.
 
Thought I would give an update. I just had a tech here to check things out. But let me go back to what happen last week. Last Wednesday a tech had to come into to replace the main tray (the one with all the lights, below the hard drive tray) because the voice mail wasn't working and all our calls were being routed to one phone (this was setup this way as a fail safe) and all the lights on it were flashing. He replaced the tray and everything was working fine again. Except that it cost us $4000 for the hardware (does this seem expensive to anyone?). Anyways back to today, this new tray seem to fail this morning and there were no lights at all except for one red one. So I thought to change the power supply. This did nothing, same result, no power. Now to the part I find odd. We put in the old tray and it powered up. So at least now we have some kind of phone system, we just need to find someone to play receptionist tomorrow.

So really the question is, how come the old tray seems to be getting power but the new one doesn't. Unless it completely failed, but wouldn't the power supply start up (and the fan spin)even if the tray failed?

Sorry if this is long, just wanted to make sure I gave all the information.

What does everyone else think?
 
Is it possible that the new tray is just not seating properly. The power supply will not work if there is no tray in the system so either your tray is defective or it is not making proper contact with the mother board. Take off the cover & make sure it is connecting properly.
 
Check the capacitors on the BFT (Base Function Tray), if they are green in color they are most likely either leaking, bulging or both. This is a sign of a defective BFT that needs to be replaced, LED's flashing on front of BCM was your indication. The new BFT's that I have seen are equipped with blue capacitors. Make sure the new BFT has the blue caps on it. Another option would be to solder new capacitors on your original BFT as that's all Nortel would have done, replace with the same uF, voltage and temperature as originals.
A few years back Nortel had a replacement program for this but it has since been closed so you are probably out of luck getting a free one.
 
And to answer your question about how much.. $4000 is waay too much to pay for a motherboard. The MSC (the card that actually runs all the phones) is a PCI card that can be moved to a new Base Function Tray (motherboard). Which also means no new keycodes to buy...

Just my two cents..


--DB
 
Here is the final result. We replaced the BFT and everything is back to normal. Thank you everyone for your help.

DBrewsky: It was the BFT that cost us $4000. We did move the old PCI card from the old BFT to the new one. So you are saying I am right that this is like double the cost of what it should be? I am going to complain to see if we can get the price reduced. But what are you suppose to do at the time. They kind of have us by the "you know what" since we needed our phone system working ASAP. They probably could have said $6000 and I still would have had to say yes to buying it. Damn phone company!
 
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