System dates from 2008. Current owner acquired it as part of buy-out of bankrupt cabinetry firm so no support from original vendor and out of NEC 5 year parts warranty.

VM subsystem stopped working after a power outage. First assumed board was fried but determined it was in a 90 second long boot loop (responds to pings, then stops responding, starts again, etc.) Mounted the 512MB CF card and found to my surprise that the VM system is an MS-DOS application running on a SBC with a DSP. Check of the file system shows all manner of logging going on that confirms the boot loop and shows the problem to be

NSL Feature enabled: Failed loading DLL

Attempt to copy CF to a disk works except for two files, one being VM\Bin\NSL.DLL which I assume is the failure noted above. Another file VM\Bin\XLT\XLT.MLT is also unreadable. Chkdsk shows crosslinked file blocks and incorrect file sizes which to me look like the result of wild writes to the CF (for the logging I assume) while the power was failing. Repairing the files using Chkdsk "corrects" the errors but the boot loop continues.

I can't find any backup of the contents of the CF (only 86 of 487MB are in-use) elsewhere on the CF or any media that exists on-site.

Hard to tell if the CF media is worn out (system was lightly used at most) or where to get a CF card these days, never mind the necessary software. I've seen replacement cards at the $500 to $1000 price point but I'd love to try replacing the bad files before telling the current owner to spend that kind of money to repair the Aspire or who knows what to replace it.

Suggestions?

Seems like the labor involved in trying to save the AspireMail would eat up any potential savings.

I would consider pulling it out, and replacing it with Aspire Intramail - which you can pick up pretty reasonably off the reseller market.

As you know - Aspire was retired several years ago - so support is hard to come by.

I have had a couple of systems where the AspireMail has gone bad, but I don't recall ever having an IntraMail fail on me.

It's like buying a 7 year old computer. If you lost files chances are the CF is failing anyways. They are only rated for so many read/writes. Voice mail is not something I would to "just kinda work" WAY too many ways to lose business with something that isn't reliable. We are also in your area and we are about to replace our last 2 Aspires this month. NEC is offering 0% financing and get into the 5 year and out just like everything else for replacement.

I understand the life-cycle model for everything from central office (5ESS specifically) equipment to PCs. Try as I might, the small business customers I have are all wedded to the break-fix model, doubly so since things when south in 2008. Those that have not already gone under are just trying to survive till people start spending again. Big ticket items (e.g. a forklift for a hardware store) just don't happen while smaller things like an hand-held inventory scanner are E-Bayed.

I'll share the group's wisdom with the owner and see where that goes. Thanks for the input.

The only thing I can suggest file wise is try using chkdsk when you have it mounted and see if you can recover the files.