sundance-communications.com/forum Forums TDM Business Telephone Systems NEC Telephones & Systems Failing Hard disk in VMS

I have an NEC Elite 192 with voicemail card. The card has a 6G hard disk that is failing. About once a day the VMS hangs and I have to restart the system (I suspend VMS, reboot the Elite 192) and re-enable VMS and it wil work for about another day. I assume the Hard Disk is failing because its really noisy (scratchy like dragging a box across the floor). My question is, how much of the VMS ssystem in in the hard disk and how much is in the fiirmware? If I replace the drive will the VMS still work? Will I be able to reconfigure the users mailbox via the phone or will I have to connect my PC up to re-initialize? I'm not worried about losing the voicemails.

I would find a low cost FMS or VMP replacement card. No hard drive, flash based.

can I copy the HD onto a flash and replace it? Can I copy the HD to another HD (larger) and replace it?

No. The HDs / flash roms are key coded to the software. You can only use an official NEC / Activoice drive. If its an old DOS mail you may have a job trying to find a replacement unless someone here has 2nd hand parts..

I put the drive in my external mount and was able to read the drive for a few hours. I copied all the data off and it was a dos 6.22 system. I had no problems copying all the data off the drive and could even run disk check and a defrag. About 1/2 way through the defrag the drive stopped responding and now I cant even mount it any more. I'm letting it cool for a few hours to see if it responds again tomorrow. You say its 'keyed' to a particular system, how? if I mount the drive in unix and DD all the data blocks in and dd all the blocks back out to another drive it would be virtually identical at a block level on the drive (including all boot sectors). How could it tell the difference then?

NEC is very good at protecting their Software.

by protecting, I assume you mean there is something in the software that registers it to this system. I'm not trying to use it elsewhere, I want to copy the data to a new drive and use it on the same system. If its "keyed" to this particular system then it should work, Its the same system?

Yes, but NEC used to sometimes use firmware codes -- this would be on the printed circuit board of the hard disk -- so that the phone system would know that the voicemail hadn't been tampered with. So your new HDD might work... or might not.

Good luck.

I would be curious to see if this can be done .... i have always been told that ESI hard drives are proprietary and could not be cloned.

One of my customers has a computer guy that swears he can do it ....... i have always countered with the argument that it makes no sense to pay him to try it when it most likely won't work .... the couple of hours of labor cost should be used on the new drive.

This sounds like a similar situation.

If you use a 3rd party program to "clone" the drive it will work. Just using Windows utility to copy the drive is probably not going to be successful.

At one point NEC wanted upwards of $600 for these drives, with their utility on it. No room for markup or labor. I would also find the the VMS/VMP card would also have an issue calling for a total replacement. They get wide eyed when they hear how much that is going to cost!

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