Format Hard Drive on 3300 1

[12345kevin]

I have purchased some IDE hard drives, identical type to those installed in some of our 3300's. However it would appear that they have to be correctly formatted before they can be installed on the 3300 ! I have been told there is a way of doing it from VXworks, does anybody have the relevant info please. I want these as spares for our engineers an object to paying "mitel prices" for these parts.

 

[TheMitelGuy]

Part number: 50004750

 

[12345kevin]

What is the part no. for ?

 

[TheMitelGuy]

To complete your task the proper way.

 

[MitelInMyBlood]

Kevin, just for a point of information none of the secondary market shops hack the hard drives either.

Back in the days of the black boxes when Mitel 40-meg drives were $3700.00 apiece for the old SG then yes, it was pretty common to see non-Mitel drives showing up inside the drive cages.

However, at a dealer cost of less than $500 today, when you need a replacement drive, you order one. You'll receive a premium quality professional grade drive, rated for 24/7 continuous commercial service.

 

[12345kevin]

I normally have no objection to paying a resonable price. With the SG's & lights etc, these were SCSI drives and you expect to pay a premium. However when a Maxtor IDE Drive from Mitel is £265.00 (dealer price) and I can get exaxtly the same drive from my PC component supplier for £26.00 (same part number & model number) I have to question where I buy it from !

 

[MitelInMyBlood]

And you're absolutely positive it has the exact same controller BIOS...

We've seen similar strange things with Cisco routers where seemingly plain vanilla Ram memory "from Cisco" and certified by them sells for 10x what you pay for "the same" memory from Fry's

But when you plug the cheap memory into your Cisco router it frequently exhibits problems.

I would think if you're selling maintenance contracts to your customers that they have a reasonable expectation to have 1st quality service along with 1st quality parts.

Gee whiz, are you really replacing that many drives? The oldest 3300 in our fleet (presently 35 systems) came with 3.1 software on it, now has 6.1 on it and so far hasn't missed a lick.

 

[mitelman]

We have sucessfully ghosted a hardrive in our shop and had to put it out in the field. It was an 80gb even though the regulars harddrives are 40. I am not sure if the system has been upgraded to release 6 though. It was ghosted at 5.0.5.5.

 

[drichter12]

I would have to agree with MitelInMyBlood on this one as even though we have on average probably 1 hd failure a month. At least it's our vendor/service contractor who has to pay for out-of-warranty parts so I guess I can afford to expect "genuine Mitel"

Dale

 

[CaperJ]

You cannot put a blank and have it format. You need to ghost an original using sector by sector as there are special partitions already on the drive from mitel. Once you ghost it you can continue to use it in further upgrades.

 

[MitelInMyBlood]

drichter12 writes:

"I would have to agree with MitelInMyBlood on this one as even though we have on average probably 1 hd failure a month. At least it's our vendor/service contractor who has to pay for out-of-warranty parts so I guess I can afford to expect "genuine Mitel" "

1 a month??? Really?
How many systems are we talking about here?
Any unusual or harsh environments?
Unless you have a few thousand systems, losing an avg of 1 HD a month seems unusual to me.
Somewhere I was told those are rated over 80,000 hrs MTBF.
80,000 hrs is 9 years.
Granted that's an average failure rate, but still 1 a month makes me want to seek more info. What's going on here?

 

[12345kevin]

OK, IDE harddrives can be formatted correctly using the 3300. A user on another forum has given me the details. I have succesfully formatted 3 different IDE hard drives and run them on our test system. You need to put 2 files in the FTP server and the releveant script & file info into VXworks.

Kevin

 

[drichter12]

To MitelInMyBlood

We have about 235 at this time. The environments are typical of retail (crowded equipment rooms where the temp is anywhere from 75 to 90 degrees F.). I would estimate 400-700 calls a day per system with an average of 30-40 phones per system.



Dale

 

[GX5Krocks]

good luck getting support with your own hard drives... you won't get any

 

[CaperJ]

This is for an emergency situation only. Secondly the only time a support call would be madeon this issue is if the drive failed, and you ould have to be dense to callon that.

 

[andy4uk]

On one of your last reply's MitelInMyBlood mentioned,

Somewhere I was told those are rated over 80,000 hrs MTBF.
80,000 hrs is 9 years.
Granted that's an average failure rate, but still 1 a month makes me want to seek more info. What's going on here?


Where the hell did he get this from, over the past 12 months i have had around 1 harddrive failure a month - the last two have been sent back to Mitel as my customers were told their new Mitel system would run for years..!!

1st was 6 months old and the 2nd was 2 weeks old.

They were really Pissed....???

I had a response back from Mitel reference the hard drive and they came back with........ Hard drive failure???

I knew THAT..?? They could'nt come back with any thing else??

I have been ghosting these hard drives for the last 2 years - just make sure that when you install these, label them with your company name, just so you know if it's a mitel or you company's.

However these have been for an emergency situation only.

£26.00 FOR A HARD DRIVE, DAAAAAAAA sorry but I totally agree with Kevin.

How do Mitel support the Hard drives - if they fail they tell you to replace it and throw the old one in the bin.

Andy

 

[MitelInMyBlood]

At the unusually high failure rate you're experiencing I would start looking at environmental issues, including shock, vibration and temperature, power cycling on and off, etc. In an ideal environment those drives will (or should) keep spinning for a long time.

Can you tell us about the typical installation(s) where you've experienced HD failures? IE, locations, type of mounting (rackmount/wall mount? UPS-backed power? ambient temperature extremes high & low, are these in So. Cal where the ground shakes? are they going inside construction trailers? any nearby blasting going on? next to any railroads (where the ground also shakes)? anything else in common? etc)

How many of those crashing are early models with 20-gig drives?


VOL FOR DISK SYSUSER LOAD $2900 REDUN $3800 LAB1

 

[andy4uk]

Hi MitelInMyBlood,

First one was in a collage, system was located within a cabinet on a 1st floor comms room - Air conditioning with a UPS also installed.(Harddrive failed after 7 months)

Second was again located within a cabinet on a 1st floor comms room - Air conditioning with UPS installed (Harddrive failed after 2 weeks)

I have experienced a system failure after i installed a system which was located in a tidy comms room with 2 MASSIVE UPS batteries, 2 servers and 10 switches, the temp was unbearable and the customer was advised to install air conditioning which they never did - 10 months later the system failed, we changed the system out and the customer paid for with an argument.

Within a few days they had air conditioning put in.

I always make sure now that ventilation is always available, I have never come across any issues with the gound shaking (are you in the USA) in England we don't have earth quakes......!!!

Might still be something to consider, you never know..??