sundance-communications.com/forum Forums TDM Business Telephone Systems Toshiba Telephones & Systems IVP8 with low flash disk space (64MB)

Our Stratagy IVP8 system is suffering from decreasing storage space. It has the OEM 64MB compact flash card; I was able to shut it down, extract the card, and then made a copy of the card to my laptop for review. I did this via a USB flash card reader, but running under Linux to ensure that Windows didn't mess with boot sectors or such.

I did find a rather sizable USERID.LOG and STRATAGY.LOG, which per documentation are safe to remove. The entire voicemail (vmb.db) directory is 12MB; messages store (vox.db) is at 20MB. However, there are MANY other files in the root which I can't find referenced online or in the forums here.

On the root of the flash card are 6MB (that's 10% of the disk space!) of files named vmb.000 thru vmb.085. It appears these are created every couple weeks at the same time. I suspect these are backups of the vmb.dat.

Are these vmb.(number) files safe to remove? Or is there a setting I should review to reduce the number of backups? I really can't imagine I'd need these going back a year or more.

Related: is it safe to put the OEM flash card into a standard Windows USB flash card reader for backup? I realize reformatting it will nuke the card of course--just wondering if I can safely do maintenance (backup and restore) from Windows instead of DOS or Linux.

I have used Windows to copy files using a USB reader within windows. I have also copied files to another flash drive and everything worked ok. I upgraded storage on a system using a pre-formated card from toshiba and copied everything over, except the boot files. It booted up fine.

I suspect the vmb files are backups as well. when moving the database to a new system I do not copy those.

Just had an "AH HA!" moment to get the upgrade done... as the MasterCard commercial says...

• 2 USB CF card readers: $24
• Sandisk 2GB Ultra II CF card: $16
• Symantec Ghost Corporate Edition: $39
• 124 hours of voicemail space? Priceless!

That should do until we upgrade the whole shootin' match later this year.

Plugged in the old 64MB flash and new 2GB flash card, fired up Ghost, and just cloned the old flash card onto the new one. Done and done.

I just hope that ROMDOS is happy with such a large amount of space!

It would be nice if that worked. I have heard of some people cloning a drive and it works, and others say it didn't. I have not tried.

Toshiba says that the IVP8 revision 1 (shipped with 64Meg) can expand to 256 meg. The rev 2 (shipped with 256 meg) can expand to 512.

I would wonder if Toshiba's "expandable to" statements indicate the availability of CF cards at the time of publishing. Were there 1GB+ cards when rev 2 shipped? Does more recent documentation indicate the larger size?

It's working thus far. My tech says that (in general) if it's working now, it's probably OK. I'll quite likely be replacing the entire VM system before we'd fill 256MB anyway.

There isn't newer documentaion on it. The only CF card that I saw Toshiba offered for R1 (which is no longer available last I check) is 256 meg. If it can actally read the card, my guess is that it will use work ok.

Thats cool it works. Makes me want to try it myself. I know a few customers on Rev 1 that keep running out of VM space. I have a CF reader. I just didn't think you could clone a card like that.

If you used Ghost to clone I believe that just clones the 64meg partition still leaving the new card at 64 megs with 1.936 of un-partitioned space. You would need to use a partition resizer to get a larger space in the rom-dos partition but not sure how large the os and bios will accept.

Raw partition copies would definitely cause that. I tried to use Linux DD to perform the copy originally, but it didn't work as I expected.

In the final clone, I used Symantec Corporate Edition v11, which is capable of resizing target partitions during copy to any arbitrary size for FAT, FAT32, NTFS, and Linux filesystems.

It would perhaps be "safer" to clone the partition resized to the stated Toshiba maximum of 256MB, regardless of the size of the real media. The real limiting factor is the filesystem support of ROMDOS, which should be 2GB absolute maximum for a partition, assuming standard FAT16 support. I assume that Stratagy's computation of time remaining is accurate and uses a 32-bit value; otherwise, it's theoretically possible Stratagy would calculate that an unusually large amount of free space returns a negative value, and behavior at that point would be unpredictable.