sundance-communications.com Forums Telephony Discussion Phone & VoIP Systems Inter-Tel Telephones & Systems NT/2000 voice mail w/ IDE adaptor and 8gb flash card

Is it possible or has anyone tried to replace the old 2gb to 8gb HDs in the old Axxessory Talk voice mails with an IDE adaptor/CF?

Seems like if it worked it would make for a much more bulletproof VM machine.

Just a thought.

A have a SYBA IDE to CF adaptor and a Kingston 8gb CF card sitting around I might try. Load W2000 and Avdap up on it.

I saw this on a Vodavi a few weeks ago and it worked perfect, so not sure why it wouldn't be a better solution

We got the PC to see the CF card as a bootable IDE drive, so after I find a copy of W2000 Pro will give it a spin!

That worked out very nice. When you guys have an earlier VM HD crash, this is the way to go. Finding an <8gb drive nowadays isn't easy. This sets up fast and is much more reliable.

I had an issue with the way those hard drives are capped. You can use a larger drive but once you use it in a voicemail, it seems to be next to impossible to remove the cap so you can use it in a PC or something. Any ideas?

I know we had to re-format the CF to NTFS to get it to work. The 8GB CFs are pretty cheap when it is dumpster toss time we probably wouldn't even bother pulling it out.

Never was a big fan of Enterprise Messaging, so it is nice to know we can keep the old NT/2000 machines on life support. Since they need the ISA slots for the VPUs, there is no chance of putting in a newer PCs.

Project was fun. Never seen anyone do this with an old voice mail.

It has been in service now for four days with no issues. Time will tell I guess.

I have a similar pc that is rebooting very frequently now. I cant get any info on it to see what the problem is. Do you know if I can get the software to rebuild this. I am thinking of installing a second hard drive and building a new instance. Will this run on 2k3 server? Its on 2k workstation now. Thanks for your help. Eric

FYI - Consumer CF cards are not meant for excessive read/write cycles, which is exactly what a VPU does when it plays an AA prompt, system prompt or appends a logfile.

The 5000 systems use an industrial CF card for this reason; one which is rated at a much higher duty cycle. For example, even though SanDisk calls this card a model "5000" I'm referring to the Inter-Tel/Mitel 5000.

I like your idea and think your solution will work, just don't know for how long. Don't take this the wrong way, but the Inter-Tel smart guys already crossed this bridge when the 5000 was developed and they decided on industrial CF over consumer CF.

Hey Jake!

Welcome home buddy. We've missed you.