Recovering From A System Panic - HP Model 745 - VME Workstation Owner's Manual

CAUTION:
9-6
Dealing With Problems

Recovering from a System Panic

Recovering from a System Panic
A system panic simply means that the operating system encountered a condi-
tion that it did not know how to respond to, so it halted your system.
System panics are rare and not always the result of a catastrophe. They
sometimes occur at boot if your system previously was not shut down prop-
erly. Sometimes they occur as the result of a hardware failure. In a clustered
HP-UX environment, a diskless client node will panic if too much time has
elapsed since its last communication with its server. This could be the result
of nothing more than a LAN cable that has been disconnected for too long.
Recovering from a system panic can be as simple as rebooting your system.
If you have an up-to-date set of file system backup or system recovery tapes,
the worst case scenario would involve reinstalling the operating system and
restoring any files that were lost or corrupted. If this situation was caused by
a rare hardware failure such as a disk head crash, you will, of course, have to
have the hardware fixed before you can perform the reinstallation.
If you use fast boot mode, make sure only one graphics subsystem is installed
in the board computer and that the graphics subsystem is configured as the
console.
When fast boot is selected during boot configuration the Processor-Depen-
dent Code ("PDC") does a very abbreviated test of only the console path. If
your Model 745 has graphics (on-board or as an additional card) and the
console device is an RS-232C port, then the system cannot successfully boot
in fast boot mode and will panic. This is because the PDC code cannot ini-
tialize the graphics ASIC, if it is not the console.