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

Administering a System: Booting and Shutdown
Abnormal System Shutdowns
Chapter 5 553
If you chose to do a partial save by leaving the SAVECRASH environment
set to 1, and by setting the environment variable called SAVE_PART=1 (in
the file /etc/rc.config.d/savecrash) the only pages that were copied
to your HP-UX file system area during the boot process are those that
were on paging devices. Pages residing on dedicated dump devices are
still there. To copy the remaining pages to the HP-UX file system area
when your system is running again, use the command called crashutil.
See the crashutil (1M) for details.
Example 5-39 Example
/usr/sbin/crashutil /var/adm/crash/crash.0
Savecrash Options for Compressed Dumps
The savecrash command runs during boot to copy the dump from the
dump devices to its storage location in the HP-UX file system.
Compressed dump configuration has the following impact on savecrash
operations:
• The savecrash command takes less time to copy the compressed
dump. The compressed dump requires less disk storage space.
• You can still use the savecrash command with the -p option to avoid
saving portions of the dump from dedicated dump devices.
• Although you can specify the -z option with the savecrash, the
option is ignored. This is because the dump is already compressed.
• Use the savecrash -s chunksize option with care. If you specify a
chunk size that is less than the memory size corresponding to one
compression unit of a compressed dump, the -s option will also be
ignored. See savecrash (1M)
Converting the Format of Uncompressed Dumps
Over the course of many recent HP-UX releases, the format of the saved
memory image (as saved in the HP-UX file system area) has changed. If
you are analyzing a crash dump on a computer running a different
version of HP-UX than the computer that crashed, or if you are using a
debugging tool that does not understand the specific format of the saved
file, you might not be able to analyze the crash dump in its current
format. You can use crashutil to convert from one file type to another.