I'm a new member and I'm in a bad way with my phone system. I have a Strata DK16 with a VP100 voicemail processing box. It is all mounted on one large board and two days ago I unmounted the board and moved it to a new location 2 miles down the road. I re-wired the extension and good to go except the voicemail will not do anything. The system will not answer when the phone rings any more and I usually press cnf/trn and then 300 and it brings me to my greeting and now that doesn't answer. the box has a red light on....tech said hard drive is dead. What can I do? Replace the drive or is he wrong? Really need help. Thanks in advance

The tech could be right. That voicemail is OLD and the act of not shutting it down correctly combined with moving it around may have been too much to handle. Try this...unplug all phone system connections to the VP100 and then reboot. Those units take about 10 minutes to boot up. See if the red light goes out and re-connect the phone system.

What is the proper way to shut down the system? The hard drive spins up when it is turned on and then after about 10 seconds it just stops spinning. Is there any way to just replace the hard drive? Thanks for the quick reply

The proper way to shutdown the system is through a terminal connection. Unfortunately that system is long since discontinued. Toshiba doesn't support it any longer.

Any idea on the hard drive spinning and then stopping? Could I log in and get any more information on the drive? Could I just replace the drive? I would like to do that if possible..

I have seen this system maybe 2 times and never really worked on them.

If it is like other voicemail systems, then the hard drive contains all the software needed to run the system. Replacing the hard drive with another blank one would not do any good since there is no software on a new drive. You could not "Log In" since it is not up and running, unless logging-in is another way of saying to open the cover. I don't know if that system has a PC monitor connecion.

The only possibily would be to remove it and clone the drive, but that would likely not work because the original drive does not work. A scan disk would be the ony other option if that system runs on DOS.

No way for me to tell if the tech is correct. The drive may be defective or files are currupted, which will both lead to the same result, dead voicemail.

I used to work on these quite a bit, still even have the manual.
They do not run dos, I believe it is OS2.

If the drive is bad, you would have to reload the software, but it is not available, even if you did find a copy, there is not a disk drive on the VP100 to load it from.

AS mentioned, this system is OLD, OLD and tired.
Nice in its time, but I do not think you are going to be able to fix this.

Well I appreciate everyones help with this. Next question would be where to go now? I have a Strata Dk16e and need a new voicemail system evidently. I am on a shoestring budget but can not go without this voicemail system. I found a Strategy 4 port unit on ebay. I'm pretty sure this would work with my system. What do you guys think? Is the Stratagy easy to program? I know it's used but my last one lasted probably 20 years. What is a good system I could buy that would be affordable and equivelant to the VP100? Shouldn't take much the VP100 was 20 year old technology......Thanks in advance.

If you purchase one on Ebay you never no what your gonna get , also you better make sure they give you the passwords and the software to program it.

You might also be buying a voicemail with potential hard drive issues as the Stratagy DK was prone to HD failures.
Stratagy Flash might be better as it is an external unit and no hard drive.