Dump Order; What Happens When The System Crashes - HP 9000 V-Class Operator's Manual

Recovering from failures
Abnormal system shutdowns
To have crashconf add the devices represented by the block device files
/dev/dsk/c0t1d0 and /dev/dsk/c1t4d0 to the dump device list,
enter the following:
/sbin/crashconf /dev/dsk/c0t1d0/dev/dsk/c1t4d0
To have crashconf replace any existing dump device definitions with
the logical volume /dev/vg00/lvol3 and the device represented by
block device file /dev/dsk/c0t1d0, enter the following:
/sbin/crashconf -r /dev/vg00/lvol3 /dev/dsk/c0t1d0

Dump order

The order that devices dump after a system crash is important when
using the primary paging device along with other devices as a dump
device.
Regardless of how the list of currently active dump devices was built
(from a kernel build, from the /etc/fstab file, from use of the
crashconf command, or any combination of the these) dump devices are
used (dumped to) in the reverse order from which they were defined. The
last dump device in the list is the first one used, and the first device in
the list is the last one used.
Place devices that are used for both paging and dumping early in the list
of dump devices so that other dump devices are used first and
overwriting of dump information due to paging activity is minimized.

What happens when the system crashes?

This section discusses the unlikely event of a V-Class system crash. A
system panic means that HP-UX encountered a condition that it could
not to handle. Sometimes the cause of the crash is apparent, but many
times an in-depth analysis is required. HP-UX is equipped with a dump
procedure to capture the contents of memory at the time of the crash.
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