nibblesoft
IS-IT--Management
I recently bought a second hand BCM400 off of ebay. I expected it would just be good for spare parts - primarily to have a PSU and some of the modules, in case they go wrong on our production setup.
The unit was full of dust and muck, and initially it wouldn't boot to anything, purely just powering up. I gave it a really thorough clean out, and to my delight everything came to light. I was able to repeatedly fire up the unit, and boot into the OS 3.6 2.2c install I found operating on there (they hadn't changed the default ee_admin account, so that was a winner too for preserving licenses).
Suddenly yesterday, when I was working through the configuration in the Unified Manager (if that is what it's called?), it suddenly froze up. I had to power off, and on reboot I got no VGA out signal, and these 6 green LEDs just keep flashing on the front. This is from LED 3 to 8, looking at the block of LEDs on the front. I've read about the swollen capacitor issue on the mobo - these seem to be fine and are the blue ones, not the green and gold ones I've read about being trouble.
It's possible the HDD has gone wrong - I've removed this and connected to a IDE to USB convertor, and it's spinning up but not appearing under Windows. I used this same convertor previously to (thankfully) make an image state backup with Acronis True Image on my PC a couple of days back.
If it is the HDD, would this really stop the system from POSTing and showing the Nortel splash screen when the BIOS initialises? I'm under no dillusion that the BCM400 is essentially an IBM compatible PC running NT4 embedded with various interface add-ons, and I would have thought that it POSTed even if a HDD is absent, but perhaps I am naively wrong - am happy to be corrected! Otherwise, could the power / IDE daughterboard be a possible problem, as well as the motherboard itself?
I routing around for an old IDE HDD I can try testing with......
Any input massively valued Many thanks
The unit was full of dust and muck, and initially it wouldn't boot to anything, purely just powering up. I gave it a really thorough clean out, and to my delight everything came to light. I was able to repeatedly fire up the unit, and boot into the OS 3.6 2.2c install I found operating on there (they hadn't changed the default ee_admin account, so that was a winner too for preserving licenses).
Suddenly yesterday, when I was working through the configuration in the Unified Manager (if that is what it's called?), it suddenly froze up. I had to power off, and on reboot I got no VGA out signal, and these 6 green LEDs just keep flashing on the front. This is from LED 3 to 8, looking at the block of LEDs on the front. I've read about the swollen capacitor issue on the mobo - these seem to be fine and are the blue ones, not the green and gold ones I've read about being trouble.
It's possible the HDD has gone wrong - I've removed this and connected to a IDE to USB convertor, and it's spinning up but not appearing under Windows. I used this same convertor previously to (thankfully) make an image state backup with Acronis True Image on my PC a couple of days back.
If it is the HDD, would this really stop the system from POSTing and showing the Nortel splash screen when the BIOS initialises? I'm under no dillusion that the BCM400 is essentially an IBM compatible PC running NT4 embedded with various interface add-ons, and I would have thought that it POSTed even if a HDD is absent, but perhaps I am naively wrong - am happy to be corrected! Otherwise, could the power / IDE daughterboard be a possible problem, as well as the motherboard itself?
I routing around for an old IDE HDD I can try testing with......
Any input massively valued Many thanks