I have a customer with a BCM50 that stopped working. After powering it up the power LED stays solid but the status LED stays solid yellow. Sometime both leds will flash yellow. then go back to power green & status yellow. When connecting to the OAM port I have a link light but no DHCP. It just times out. Am I safe to same the hard drive took a dump and needs to be replaced? Thanks for any help.

is your bcm on a network by any chance do you have any modules give us more details and well see what we can do.
Just to save time if you do have exp cabinets try rebooting the bcm alone,and the reason i'm asking if its on a network i had a bcm once that i did a backup from a work station and the bcm locked up.

If your system is a Version 1, it's probably toast! Even some of the early 2's. If it's more than 2 cabs only boot the main cab. It takes about 20 minutes to initialize. If it fails look for a replacement!

It is release 1.0 and has only 1 cabinet. The customer said that the bcm would lock up every couple of months and they would unplug it. The last time they did it, it never came back up. If I change the hard drive will system ID should stay the same? If so will be able to retreive the keycodes from Nortel?

One thing that you can check is to open the cabinet and make sure that the ribbon cable is plugged into the HDD tightly. I had one to do the very same thing and we replaced it. After that I talked with an engineer from Nortel and explained what happened and he told me that if I ever encounter this again to check the ribbon cable connection to the HDD. Just a thought.

Update- The hard drive was indeed dead. Replaced with a new hard drive and downloaded the keycodes from Nortel. Reprogrammed it and everything is good.