We have sold and installed hundreds of these voice mail systems over the years. Now, the 486 platform digital systems are beginning to fail, always requiring that the hard drive be replaced. Every one that we sold about three years ago is doing exactly the same thing. The customers are angry since a drive replacement is expensive and they shouldn't have to pay for something like that after a relatively short period of time.

These were right around the time when systems had the BIOS problem where they were shipped with the wrong chipset that would cause the drive to fail.

Vodavi says they don't know anything about a "lot" failure (manufacturing defect) but I don't believe that we are the only company in the country that has had to replace 10 hard drives on the exact same systems in a 90 day window.

Is anyone out there experiencing similar problems? All other Talkpath and Dispatch models are working fine; it's just the 3-year old 486's that are failing. Any comments?

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Ed
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How come there's always enough time to go back and fix it a second time?

What brand hard drives? They wouldn't by chance be Quantum Fireballs would they?

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Business Phone Systems

Funny you bring that up...I just replaced a Digital Dispatch HDD last week. The system is about a year and a half old. Just died. Could not find the boot sector.

I can't remember the brand of drive.

rather be fishing,

I personally like the Quantum Fireballs, but im just curious, have you had bad luck with them??? why is it you brought up that HD?




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Kristopher M.
A.D.S.P. Central Administration Unit #424

Quantum Fireballs have one of the worst reps for failures. I have at least 50 bad ones. The saving grace is that it's a pretty good chance it is the controller card on the bottom of the drive. I keep a bunch around for the controller card swap. Usually can recover the data and copy to a different drive. Not too happy with Western Digital Caviar series either.

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Business Phone Systems

This is a follow up to my original post:

I had a conversation with the higher-ups at Vodavi last week. Apparently, replacing the hard drive isn't all that needs to be done. Just installing one of their off-the-shelf hard drive kits is only part of what needs to be done.

We are also supposed to be confirming the BIOS chips on the motherboard and obtaining the correct ones from Vodavi at the time that the drive is replaced. We are telephone men, not IT people, so we had no clue that this is necessary. Maybe a computer person would know, but that's another issue I have altogether.

Of course, this still doesn't answer the question as to why so many of the drives are failing at all.

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Ed
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How come there's always enough time to go back and fix it a second time?

[This message has been edited by ev607797 (edited July 05, 2005).]

i dont like the caviars either... they are too sensitive. i have about 5 of those.

we had the same issues, it appears that at one point vodavi released some talkpaths that could not regitser a large hard drive, on the talkpaths see if htere is a label that says LB, if not then you need to go into the cmos and change the harddrive to support LBA. This is of course if the talkpath is still up and running, if it dies then its to late, hope this helps