BCM400 central leds flashing & no management access 2

[charteng]

I have a BCM400 that survived a power cut and restoral, and now has the MSC/WAN/MODEM/NIC1/NIC2 leds flashing continuously.
The HDD led is off and the status led is flashing. The caps on the base board are blue..so the green thoery is out.
I have no access to system via NIC1 or 2, no access via the serial port and most suprising nothing from the onboard monitor/keyboard/mouse ports.
But the system is happy to boot up and direct calls to extentions, but alas no CallPilot / Voicemail.
Reading through the forum notes and ... the manual .. the leds give an idication of base board failure , disk controller failure or just hard disk failure.
I mainly support Panasonic and BCM50's so I am looking for a little guidance please on whether I am on the right track or I have missed something obvious..... cheers

 

[foneman1]

You might have a problem with the Base Function Tray or the hard drive or both. The fact that you do not see anything on the monitor makes me think that you have a problem with the Base Function Tray ( I think you only see information when the system reboots). The voicemail stored on the hard drive and that is why voicemail is not working. You also need to know what software the system was running and you need to match that software if you replace the hard drive, you also need to re-download the keycods. Good luck!

 

[telcodog]

Your hard drive is toast. Seen this problem too many times.

Of course you can't rule anything out but that's the most likely culprit. Telephony works because it is provided by the MSC card. Voicemail and access is provided via the hard drive.

That's what I would change first but have a BFT there just in case.

 

[Dasheen]

I agree w/ replacing the HD. Since telephony is ok, that means your MSC seems to be ok.

 

[charteng]

thanks for your comments guys .. but one thing nags me .. the keyboard/mouse/monitor connections on the BFT don't need drivers loaded on the harddrive (pls correct if I am wrong) so when all bits connected up I should at least get something from that array, especially on boot up ??? or am I heading off on a tangent path ? cheers

 

[telcodog]

With a monitor connected to the serial port, you should see the boot up info come accross the screen. If you don't, that's further proof that the problem is the hard drive that's at fault.

 

[Firebird Scrambler]

Another way is to treat the BCM as a desktop pc and remove one of the front covers to expose the Monitor, Mouse and Keyboard ports. Also open up the BCM unit to find the Floppy drive cable.

You can connect up a Floppy drive unit (even a CD-Rom drive to one of the IDE cables) and then with a recovery floppy disk i.e. Windows 98 startup disk or one for a CD etc you can then find out what components have become corrupted or has failed.

Otherwise, just remove the BCM hard disk and put it in a working desktop pc as a slave drive. I carry a USB to IDC/SATA cable and will work to most Win 2000, XP machines in the same way.

All the best

Firebird Scrambler
Meridian Programmer in the UK

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

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

 

[charteng]

thanks a lot guys for your input.
Went onsite this morning .. took out the HDD and accessed it ok via external drive bay. Copied data to make sure OK.. All seems ok. Put HDD back into BCM cage, but used external power for the drive... same BCM400 scenario, flashing leds and no HDD led on.
So if I take the logic that the drive is not fried, and having external power to the drive makes no dif, then its either the BFT (HDD controller) or the PSU feed to the BFT ???
BFT scenario ... my comment before about keyboard/mouse/ monitor was not clear..my apologies.. I had removed the BFT front cover and with a KB/Mouse/monitor attached directly to those ports there is nothing on bootup or after.
So do I move from a HDD problem to a highly suspect BFT or secondary the PSU... ???
Also, if the BFT is replaced, in swapping over the MSC will all the data on the MSC be OK ???
cheers

 

[pccal]

I still think it is a bad drive. Do you have a spare BCM drive with whatever software the 400 is running. If you do than I would suggest replacing it.You could be over thinking this one.

 

[Firebird Scrambler]

Just to clarify something here. What BCM version do you have?. If it was a 2.x or 3.x system, then it would be running Windows NT 4 software. Therefore, you could and should see around 6 partitions and many windows files to browse with if the drive was connected to another computer as e.g. a slave etc.

BCM 4.0 versions are Linux and would not be listed very easily, but could still be viewed for disk partitions via Window's disk management facility.

I agree in that it still seems to be the disk that has failed.

All the best

Firebird Scrambler
Meridian Programmer in the UK

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

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

 

[bluemr2]

The problem with BCM hard drives is corruption of data 99% of the time. You can still see the data, the drive spins, but the system will not boot. This is why the redundant BCM's are practically useless. With their mirroring, they simply mirror the corruption to the other drive and you have 2 bad drives. Out of maybe 500 BCM's sold, only 1 time has the redundency saved one of my customers.

 

[dj4020]

If software on Drive is corrupted as stated by previous posts. I have seen that when drive is bad you cannot connect to even the Maintenance port and do anything. If drive is corrupt you won't get any screens to see where it might be failing either.

 

[charteng]

once again thanks guys !!!!! .....
all your help has been great ....

the last bunch of posts have answered the "why no screen?" scenario.
FYI .. Browsing through the hard drive I found reference to 3.7, therefore a 3.x system ... and yes the HDD did have NT4.0 on it. thanks for that tip.
So it looks as if a new HDD image & HDD is required ....
Now as the client utilises Unified messaging service & callpilot features .. is this a standard build with additional software loaded and configuration after or a standard build with keycodes to utilise the software onboard ?? .. I mainly ask due to the keycodes being on the MSC and this scenario now points to and OK BFT/MSC .. thus need only a 3.7 HDD with support for callpilot/unified message service....(or have I gone off an another track here?) cheers

 

[dj4020]

Don't trust the info on HD go to Nortel or vendor to confirm what your release is licensed for, & other licenses IP , Wireless etc. Then proceed accordingly. A non imaged drive you will need to burn the image to it then load keycode. If you do not have the image burnng software then buy an imaged drive, then all you'll need is keycode. Good luck . . .

 

[charteng]

Hey everyone... thanks for all of your help and suggestions. it was great finding this forum and throwing out a question ......
Problem was resolved.... faulty BFT ... well thats the way it goes..cheers everyone until my next post...toodlepip

 

[DBrewsky]

Glad to see you figured it out.

Just an FYI for future reference:

If the hard drive is the failure point, then you should see NO OPERATING SYSTEM or some other boot failure when you connect a monitor to the BCM and do a restart.


--DB