themaritimegirl
Technical User
Hi,
I have little knowledge and experience with telephone systems, and I've been entertaining the thought of purchasing a BCM50 and a couple of Norstar phones on eBay, just to tinker and educate myself with.
Although used BCM50 units are cheap on eBay, I'm reserved against buying one because I understand that the hard drives commonly fail (and obviously the ones on eBay usually aren't tested), and once that happens you have re-image a new drive, and then set up the license keys to make the thing functional again.
The cost of buying a second BCM50 would be prohibitive for me (and then that could have a bad drive too). The cost of buying a multi-image drive is also prohibitive. And I can't download the BCM50 hard disk image from Avaya because I'm not a company. Even if I somehow got a hold of an image, then I still have to go through a distributor, or whoever, to set up the license keys, and god knows what that costs. Or if I'm less lucky, the keys have been transferred to a new machine, and I would have to purchase new ones, the cost of which I assume would be prohibitive. If it's even still possible to purchase new keys at all.
I've also read that even just a Level 1 reset wipes out any license keys, which is bad because I'd want to do that to reset any custom admin login information and previous phone programming.
I was hoping, now that the BCM series is EOL, that hard disk images and keys would become openly available on the Internet, but it seems that's not the case.
So if I were to buy a BCM50 on eBay, and it turned out to have a bad hard disk, is there any hope for me, an individual with no professional relationship with phone equipment or users or distributors of said equipment, to restore it to working condition without going broke in the process?
I have little knowledge and experience with telephone systems, and I've been entertaining the thought of purchasing a BCM50 and a couple of Norstar phones on eBay, just to tinker and educate myself with.
Although used BCM50 units are cheap on eBay, I'm reserved against buying one because I understand that the hard drives commonly fail (and obviously the ones on eBay usually aren't tested), and once that happens you have re-image a new drive, and then set up the license keys to make the thing functional again.
The cost of buying a second BCM50 would be prohibitive for me (and then that could have a bad drive too). The cost of buying a multi-image drive is also prohibitive. And I can't download the BCM50 hard disk image from Avaya because I'm not a company. Even if I somehow got a hold of an image, then I still have to go through a distributor, or whoever, to set up the license keys, and god knows what that costs. Or if I'm less lucky, the keys have been transferred to a new machine, and I would have to purchase new ones, the cost of which I assume would be prohibitive. If it's even still possible to purchase new keys at all.
I've also read that even just a Level 1 reset wipes out any license keys, which is bad because I'd want to do that to reset any custom admin login information and previous phone programming.
I was hoping, now that the BCM series is EOL, that hard disk images and keys would become openly available on the Internet, but it seems that's not the case.
So if I were to buy a BCM50 on eBay, and it turned out to have a bad hard disk, is there any hope for me, an individual with no professional relationship with phone equipment or users or distributors of said equipment, to restore it to working condition without going broke in the process?
