MITEL Hard Drives 3

[hanoirocks]

Are Mitel Hard Drives proprietary? Or can you stick in any IDE compatible drive. They look like a standard Maxtor IDE drive to me?

Thanks in advance

 

[kwbMitel]

They require a Mitel Format but that can be done in house if you have the tools and files.

The risk isnt worth it if you're just trying to save money.

If you have a system down and cant wait for replacement I would try it but I cant think of any other times I would try.

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Hard work often pays off after time, but laziness always pays off now.

 

[CMAC1]

They are standard drives - all you need are two files;

DEV_RTC8260 and
partition40g.txt

and a 3300

Both files can be downloaded from MOL.

Works fine - I have done it many times - usually with better quality drives!!!!!

 

[kwbMitel]

The issue being that if you do not use Mitel Hard Drives, they can treat your site as "Unsupported Configuration".

Not saying they will, but they can.

*******************************************************
Hard work often pays off after time, but laziness always pays off now.

 

[T8keiteasy]

Regarding HD prices MITEL do, I would say they invite you NOT TO order HD at MITEL's....

I agree with CMAC1.

kwbMitel has always accurate point of view, but I don't think MITEL support would recognise their disk or no...

Regards

Now, it's about French users too !!!

 

[MitelInMyBlood]

In my experience you're not ever going to get asked about your physical hardware, regardless what it is or under what rock from which it came. As long as you have a legit s/w lic for the O/S and options, device licenses, etc. and a sysid to match, you're usually good to go.

It's also been my experience that the disk drives in the 3300s are not holding up. By comparison the drives in the old 2K Light would spin for years and years (easily 50,000 hours and more). The drives used in the 3300s seem to be the single weakest point in an otherwise pretty good platform, with too many failures occurring under 10,000 hrs run time.

 

[hanoirocks]

Thanks for all the feedback. I was kind of shocked at getting charged 400 bucks for a drive I could get for about $80.

 

[slapin]

I'd say $20, because it's sort of old 40G Maxtors. It has nice sticker from MITEL. I was told that any warranty will be void for the entire system if we will try to use HDD not from MITEL

 

[hanoirocks]

Ya you're right, My warranty is expired so, this will help in the future if I need to do a replacement.

Cheers

 

[MitelInMyBlood]

Sounds like the same mantra we got from them 15 yrs ago when we first discovered "DEAN" drives for literally pennies on the dollar compared to Mitel 40 megabyte drives for the old SG and S machines. We decided to try them anyway and they ran just fine. I recall this being part of a multi-kilobuck upgrade to L stream (or similar) and we decided to wave-off on the drives because Rich Banduric (engineer at Dean at the time) was a friend of my then boss and gave my boss a written guarantee (written on a cocktail napkin) that his replacement drives were every bit as good... and they were, at a fraction, literally one-tenth of the price. At the time we had 7 multi-cabinet SGs to upgrade, so this was a very substantial savings, most of which got passed on to the customer. In retrospect Rich sold those drives too cheap. We'd have been thrilled just to have been able to buy them at 1/2 what Mitel wanted.

Today's replacement drive prices (from Mitel) really wouldn't be such a bad deal if only they lasted a little longer. Swapping drives every 12~24 months doesn't play well with the bean counters when the systems are all on MA.

 

[Mitelpassion]

CMAC1, is there some sort of procedure to get this "non-mitel" harddrive to work? You did say you needed two files but what do you do with them?

Does the harddrive need to be formatted, if so using what file system? If you can, give us a little more detail.

Thanks,
e

 

[kwbMitel]

Reboot the system and stop it at the boot and enter (from this point on) the commands that need to be entered (will be in Bold and Highlighted)… Note: two files are required in your ftproot directory before executing the following…


VxWorks System Boot


Copyright 1984-2002 Wind River Systems, Inc.


CPU: Mitel Embedded PPC82XX F64
Version: VxWorks5.5.1
BSP version: 2.0/1
Creation date: Aug 24 2004, 11:37:42

Press any key to stop auto-boot...
7

[VxWorks Boot]: c

'.' = clear field; '-' = go to previous field; ^D = quit

boot device : motfcc0
processor number : 0
host name :
file name : BOOT_INSTALL DEV_RTC8260 <- Insert
Minet on ethernet (e) : 192.168.1.2:ffffff00
inet on backplane (b):
host inet (h) : 192.168.1.9
gateway inet (g) : 192.168.1.1
user (u) : ftp
ftp password (pw) (blank = use rsh): @
flags (f) : 0x0
target name (tn) :
startup script (s) : partition40g.txt <- Insert
other (o) : motfcc

[VxWorks Boot]: @ <- Insert

boot device : motfcc
unit number : 0
processor number : 0
file name : DEV_RTC8260
inet on ethernet (e) : 192.168.1.2:ffffff00
host inet (h) : 192.168.1.9
gateway inet (g) : 192.168.1.1
user (u) : ftp
ftp password (pw) : @
flags (f) : 0x0
other (o) : motfcc

Attached TCP/IP interface to motfcc0.
Attaching network interface lo0... done.
Loading... 5773712
Starting at 0x10000...


Disk Configuration Started.
Creating block device for controller 0 drive 0... done.
Creating CBIO device for controller 0 drive 0... done.
Attaching to partition table for 4 partitions on controller 0 drive 0... done.
Creating Cache Layer for partition 0 (/sysro) on controller 0 drive 0... done.
Creating Cache Layer for partition 1 (/db) on controller 0 drive 0... done.
Creating Cache Layer for partition 2 (/vmail) on controller 0 drive 0... done.

****************************
Lots of stuff, Until Below
****************************


FAT handler information:
------------------------
- allocation group size: 161 clusters
- free space on volume: 6,564,257,796 bytes
value = 0 = 0x0


-> bootChange <- Insert

'.' = clear field; '-' = go to previous field; ^D = quit

boot device : motfcc0
processor number : 0
host name :
file name : DEV_RTC8260 boot_install <- Insert
Minet on ethernet (e) : 192.168.1.2:ffffff00
inet on backplane (b):
host inet (h) : 192.168.1.9
gateway inet (g) : 192.168.1.1
user (u) : ftp
ftp password (pw) (blank = use rsh): @
flags (f) : 0x0
target name (tn) :
startup script (s) : *** Remove script *** <- Insert
other (o) : motfcc

value = 0 = 0x0
-> reboot <- Insert




*******************************************************
Hard work often pays off after time, but laziness always pays off now.

 

[IN10CT]

I have used Acronis to image my old 40Gb Mitel 3300 drive to a new 80Gb drive in order to upgrade the system. I imaged my old drive mainly to have a perfect recovery in the event something went wrong. After imaging, the 3300 would seamlessly boot from either drive.

Acronis allows you to grow each partition proportionately as well so you don't waste the new drive space.

 

[IN10CT]

ps. because there is bugger all on the Mitel drive, imaging only takes about 1 minute to complete.

The full process invloves removing the old drive from the 3300 and installing it and the new drive in any standard PC. Then boot from the Acronis recover CD and image the drive.

Acronis ($50) is a thing of beauty and supports every NIC I've encountered for imaging to network drives as well.

 

[Mitelpassion]

thanks guys...I've copied and pasted kwb's 'solution' for future use

 

[slapin]

I just manualy downloaded everything over ftp. Prepared partitions with standard fdisk and put all the stuff back. Worked without any questions. Because system blocks files befor writing anything so there is no risk to get corrupted db files

 

[hanoirocks]

I like IN10CT's solution, Thanks for all this info. Good for future use!

 

[Mitelpassion]

could you tell me where on the 3300 these files are located or where on MOL? I've checked on MOL but maybe I don't have access to the files..

thanks

 

[kwbMitel]

I found a new process on MOL and the files are no longer required.

I needed this process just last week and it worked like a
charm.

It formats the harddrive AND loads the software in about 30 minutes. (Software needs to be 6.1 UR1 or higher)

Article ID #06-9999-00020

Set up your FTP Server for software Install

Connect to the maintenance port and stop the boot process.
Change the Boot Parameters with the following values.

boot device : motfcc
file name : Boot_Install
host inet(h) : Address of Ftp Server which holds the MN3300 software (i.e. 10.44.16.126)
other(o) : FixPartition



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Occam's Razor - All things being equal, the simplest solution is the right one.

 

[Mitelpassion]

thanks this will help.
if you don't mind me asking, the article you got was this under the knowledgebase or elsewhere??

E