Hard Drive For Merlin Mail R3

[joed7070]

Hi all,

I am responsible for maintaining backup hard drives for Partner & Merlin mails in the event a replacement is needed. I want to know if anyone has had any luck cloning one and if so, what product or method works best. This is for the Partner Mail R3. It is an older CP/M and CDOS combination of partitions. Any help appreciated.

Thanks!

Joe

 

[drewmich]

Joe,

Setting up a backup of your programming for the Merlin and Partner mail stand alones is a very tricky process primarily due to the propriatary versions of the software and operating system Lucent used with the software.

If you are concerned about having a backup of the hard drive or at a minimum of your programming I usally recommend the Merlin Messaging which allows you to use the backup/restore functions built into the solftware programming to a PCMCIA card designed for that purpose. That has been a shortfall of the older Merlin/Partner voice mails.

If you do ever have a hard drive fail or other problem with your older voice mails, we can usually save your original programming during our VM repair work. It just depends on how bad the drive is damaged - lightning etc - and whether the software was corrupted on the drive.

Hope that helps.
Andrew Roach
President
Drew Communications
Drew Telecom Group, Inc.
Lucent Voice Mail and Component Repair Specialists
Lucent Telecom Brokers/Resellers
drew@triton.net
616-498-9213

 

[acarlow]

Dunno if it's been too long since you posted but here's my saga with backing up MM R3 hard drives:

I had a Merlin Mail R1 that lost it's drive and was very eager to prevent that from happening to my MM R3.

1) you need a drive with at least 16 heads.
2) you need access to a linux, *bsd or similar system.
3) use dd if=/dev/source of=/dev/destination bs=512.
i never used other paramters for bs because this worked
though it was slow.
4) it appears that the system has a custom bios that looks for the boot code in a non-standard area of the disk. This is why you can't just do a ghost or similar cloning method ( not to mention the partition table seems very screwey on the MM drive! )

I wrongly assumed that this method wouldn't work with exactly the same geometry drive. The system uses like 600 cylinders, 16 heads and 38 sectors. The 16 heads is a requirement based on the drives that failed my backup. As long as you have at least 38 sectors and/or whatever the cylinder count was you should be fine. Also note that the MM system is a 286 with a bios that won't recognized drives larger than 512mb ( or is it 540 or somethin... been too long since my 286 days ). I based my geometry info on what is printed when you do a disk test from the serial console. I only wished I had tried using dd first rather than last.

Hopefully this will save some of you all out there cause it's sure cost me an awful lot of time. It'd be nice to know it wasn't all for naught.