atcomsystems.ca/forum Forums TDM Business Telephone Systems Comdial Telephones & Systems DX-80 7270 VM problem

Hi Mark K:

Good point. Some phone companies do use proprietary formatting, making it difficult to use traditional tools on them.

It's true that some of these drives can't just be dropped into a computer and have them work.

However, it's not accurate to say they can't be
"ghosted", even with a proprietary format.

Bits are bits, and there are tools to copy one drive to another, regardless of the format.

That said, your point is right on. It's usually better to just go ahead and replace the parts to get the customer going quickly.

But there are rare occasions when the customer might be better served by recovering their data. My yardstick, and the question I always ask the customer, is: Will it take you more money and time to manually recover your info (or, as in this case, more money if the voicemails are lost) than it will to recover the data?

I've had cases where critical data was lost, and it was a better business decision to recover it than to let it go. In one situation, the "data" was a series of voicemails that were critical to a court case, and needed to be recovered.

The cost of that recovery was far less than the loss of the lawsuit would have been.

But, I do agree with you that time is money. The cost/benefit analysis should be a consideration too.

Well said Techie, there are probably a lot of circumstances that fit your senario. I know less then nothing about ghosting except that I've tried it once with no luck. Keep us posted, I hope you have a successful report for us in the end.
Mark

One of my laptops started having problems when it was 90º outside, I brought it inside and dropped the temp down to 65º and got it running long enough to back up everything I needed. The drive finally died the next day.

Customer called me Friday, Windows couldn't find the OS on his leptop. It had been sitting in his truck all day and was quite hot. Told him to cool it down, save what he needs and take it back under warranty (3 years from Best Buy).

I had an IBM clone about fifteen years ago. The 10 Meg drive did not like warm weather running sideways up, cooling fan next to it kept it running. Finally got to the point I had to lift the whole case up a quarter inch and drop it on the table to start it up.

Strange as it may sound, putting a dead or dying hard drive in the freezer really may revive it for long enough to get your data off of it. I put the bad drive in an external USB case inside two freezer bags for 24 to 72 hours. Then I connect a very long USB cable to it and shut the freezer door again. I connect this to my laptop on the kitchen counter. Then you can use a disk imaging software like Acronis to make an image of the bad hard drive.

Whether this makes economic sense or not is another question. It probably doesn't if you have other paid work to do.
If there is any data that is really important to you, don't try this but get professional help.

Some companies have had the drive manufacturers burn custom BIOS in the drive electronics precluding this.