sundance-communications.com/forum Forums TDM Business Telephone Systems Mitel Telephones & Systems SX200 DISK FAILURE?

Must be a Holiday!

Working on a SX200 Light. It will not boot, looking at possible disk failure, disk drive failure (have experienced both in the past), or Master Control failure.

I have tried 3 sets of disks, a combination of different disk drives but do not have a spare Master Control to try. I get basically the same response from the switch, error code E-b as it tries to read disk A (maybe 2 seconds)then cycles blank-2, blank-8, blank-9 and repeats starting at E-b again. The active light is lit solid, minor alarm lit solid, major alarm lit solid, critical alarm lit solid.

Any ideas? Anyone have a Master Control 9109-036-000? What other info do you need? Disks read Generic Lightware Release F62 F/W 135433931.

My usual supply/tech support contacts are closed for the holiday. Explaining I'll be back on Monday isn't going over well.

Thank you in advance.

Either a bad disk, drive or drive cable. I had a bad cable recently. Are you sure drive id is correct on the replacement?

E b
2 8 9.
Off the top of my head, I want to say that that's a Disk Drive failure code.

The Technicians Handbook, if you have one, should be able to tell you offhand what the problem is, from those two codes.

Now... It's very important that there is a Disk A that goes in Drive A, and a Disk B that goes in Drive B, and each pair of disks is "Married." That is, you can't use Disk B from set 2 with Disk A from set 1.

What I would do at this point is to CAREFULLY examine each floppy disk. Draw back the sliding door and look for a stripe where some kind of debris in the drive has scratched the disk. If you see this sort of scratch, STOP!!! Do NOT insert the next set of disks!!

A bad disk will damage a good drive, which will then damage good disks, so, in short, if the disks are scratched, you will need a new Floppy Drive and a new set of disks. From Mitel.

A floppy drive from a PC might or might not, emphasis on the "probably won't," work. But you need a clean set of unscratched disks of the exact same software release.

Assuming that you can get a Mitel floppy drive and a working set of disks, you will need a MOSS sheet, because unless they were the disks that came with the system (which, if you have a bad drive and inserted all three sets, are now all bad), you will need to rekey the system from scratch.

Please tell me that you have a relatively recent printout of CDE data...

No MOSS for the Light, decryption key decides what it can do.

Also...

Since this D/L is at least 10-15 years old, and it backs up onto floppy disks... FLOPPY DISKS!... this might be a good time to take the owner aside and discuss with him the joys of the Mitel EL/ML or the Mitel ICP.

You can make a point of pointing out that you had to scrounge parts from 3rd party suppliers because Mitel no longer makes or sells parts for this release. Ask what he's going to do for parts when these disks get dusty and go bad because of the horrible environment that this system is installed in... Etc., ...

Just a suggestion...

Okay, I may have my releases sideways... isn't this the LW 15/16 that looks like a series of PCs? Because I always had to have a MOSS sheet with those.

FWIW that boot sequence means it can't read the boot sector on drive A.

Telephoneguy is right about matched disk pairing. When working on Light drive problems, I always make sure I have a copy of an unused set of disks to work with. I also make a copy of the customers backup to work with before even trying their originals.

Think you are thinking the SX2000. Didn't need MOSS for SX200 until ML/EL.

I stand corrected. I first trained on LW17, but supported a lot of LW 15/16 at first.

Actually the first ML's were considered LW16 too.