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Recovering from failures
System panics
System panics
A system panic is the result of HP-UX encountering a condition that it is
unable to respond to and halting execution.
System panics are rare and are not always the result of a catastrophe.
They may occur on bootup, if the system was previously shut down
improperly. Sometimes they occur as a result of hardware failure.
Recovering from a system panic can be as simple as rebooting the
system. At worst, it may involve reinstalling HP-UX and restoring any
files that were lost or corrupted. If the system panic was caused by a
hardware failure such as a disk head crash, repairs have to be made
before reinstalling HP-UX or restoring lost files.
NOTE
It is important to maintain an up-to-date backup of the files on your
system so that you can recover your data in the event of a disk head
crash or similar situation. How frequently you update these backups
depends on how much data you can afford to lose. For information on
how to back up data, refer to Managing Systems and Workgroups.
After HP-UX experiences a system panic, the system:
• May display an HPMC tombstone on the console if panic was caused
• May attempt to save a core file (an image of physical memory) to the
• Attempts to reboot.
• Usually displays a panic message on the console. A panic message
• May attempt to copy the core file to the file system (by default, to the
Use the following procedure to troubleshoot a system panic:
Step 1. If an HPMC tombstone appears on the console, copy or print out the
"Machine Check Parameters" field, and all information that follows
them.
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by an HPMC. A tombstone is a list of register values used for
troubleshooting.
dump device (by default this is the primary swap device).
consists of several lines of text starting with the heading System
Panic.
directory /emp/syscore) if HP-UX can reboot.
Chapter 7
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