Managing Systems and Workgroups: A Guide for HP-UX System Administrators

Administering a System: Booting and Shutdown
Abnormal System Shutdowns
Chapter 5 531
Abnormal System Shutdowns
• “Overview of the Dump / Save Cycle” on page 532
• “Preparing for a System Crash” on page 533
— “Systems Running HP-UX Releases Prior to Release 11.0” on
page 534
— “Dump Configuration Decisions” on page 534
— “Defining Dump Devices” on page 542
• “What Happens When the System Crashes” on page 548
— “Systems Running HP-UX Releases Prior to Release 11.0” on
page 549
— “Operator Override Options” on page 549
— “The Dump” on page 550
— “The Reboot” on page 551
• “What to Do After the System Has Rebooted” on page 551
— “Using crashutil to Complete the Saving of a Dump” on page 552
— “Savecrash Options for Compressed Dumps” on page 553
— “Converting the Format of Uncompressed Dumps” on page 553
— “Converting the Format of Compressed Dumps” on page 554
— “Analyzing Crash Dumps” on page 554
When your system crashes, it is important to know why, so that you can
take actions to prevent it from happening again. Sometimes, it is easy to
determine why: for example, if somebody trips over the cable connecting
your computer to the disk containing your root file system (disconnecting
the disk).
At other times, the cause of the crash might not be so obvious. In extreme
cases, you might want or need to analyze a snapshot of the computer’s
memory at the time of the crash, or have Hewlett-Packard do it for you,
in order to determine the cause of the crash.