Hello.
I'm trying to figure out what is going wrong with our system and how to resolve it. We have an Avaya ACS R5 system with Partner Messaging 1.0. The Voicemail system would periodically go down, giving everyone a busy signal, until the system was restarted. Standing next to the box, one could hear what were obviously the sounds of a laboring hard drive. After getting a massive runaround with Avaya and having our local rep quote a fairly high price for a whole-unit-replacement as the only option, my boss decided I should take matters into my own hands and see what was wrong, the last time that it went down again (and oddly, it rolled back everyone's mailboxes a few days right beforehand)
Did a little research and the general consensus seems to be that the drive is a special format, containing some infomation unique to your system, such as the serial number and such. Decided that if we were going to try to replace the hard drive I ought to image it. Drive was a completely normal-seeming 5gb 2.5" Travelstar. Used dd, making sure that the drive wasn't mounted by the computer in case any changes were made. Got a 5gb image, which contained a ~1.5gb FAT16 partition and the rest of the data being, well, I guess raw data for the VM platform. [There is a very significant lack of information on the internals of these systems anywhere on the intenet...I know, the actual working of the systems are Avaya's trade secrets, but I would have thought other people would have been trying to do simlar things]
Got the system back together and now it is doing something new. Not functioning at all. Before it would blink the orange light to green and back, while the drive made bursts of typical
5-year-old-travelstar-trying-to-seek noises (and sometimes, eventually go to a solid green after a fair amount of minutes). Now, it comes on immediately with an orange light, no drive noises, and stays that way, eternally. There is a faint high pitched noise coming from the unit that I can detect, but I don't think it's the drive, it's sounds more like an electrical component, and it may have been there before and I'm just now noticing it because I'm listening for clues.Oh, and of course the unit doesn't respond via RS232 or ethernet, terminal or the Admin program.
Ok, well enough backstory, I guess I may as well ask actual questions.
1) Does the Avaya unit have any sort of tamper prevention? I can't see any physical signs, the unit is actually really simply designed inside. The only two things I did, other than removing the PC card after powering it down, were to unplug the power board briefly from the main board, and of course, removing the HD from the unit. I guess it's remotely possible that some minor change got written to the FAT16 partiton of the drive *somehow*, but on a whim, I removed the drive and powered up the unit without (once I determined that it was very likely dead-acting). Same symptoms, same possible high-pitched noise, no signs of activity. Plugged the drive into a powered connector (not hooked up to a computer or anything) and the drive spins up fine, so it's not as if it abruptly failed after imaging it.2) Has anyone had any luck with replacing the drive in these units with a different type? It sounds as if the capacities are hard-coded, so while the idea of getting extended storage is fantastic, I'm more concerned with trying to find a *new* 5gb 2.5" drive in this day and age.
3) Are there any other "problem" areas to investigate in these units? I know the general consensus is "consult your local avaya rep before monkeying around in the unit, you don't know what you're doing for a reason" but I'm a bit disenchanted after all the hoops we had to jump through to even *find* a rep, (our original one seems to have disappeared) and their answer was the replace the whole unit for something like $1500 or so. Oh, and avaya themselves wanted $400 just to walk through the door, much less whatever it was to diagnose and repair the problem.4) If all else fails, if we obtain Partner Messaging V7 will we be able to not only transplant our current 2-port card into it, but to restore the system backup I did shortly before it failed to the new unit? (What exactly does get backed up, anyway? I imagine it's not the entirety of the voicemail system, greetings and such)
Personally, I'd love to really dig into this and play with it, but without any voicemail system at all, well...businesses seem to want those back ASAP.