How To Run savecore Manually While Booted In Single User From CDROM (Doc ID 1010334.1)

Last updated on JULY 06, 2023

Applies to:

Goal

For various reasons it may be necessary to gather a crash dump while booted from alternate media, for example if the system is not booting properly from the normal boot disk. This document outlines the steps required to accomplish this.

In general, the steps required are:

1. Boot from the alternate media
2. Mount the root filesystem
3. Determine the dump device
4. Save the crashdump from the dump device
5. Unmount the root (and other) filesystems

Step 1 will depend on whether you are using a SPARC or an Intel based box. Booting an Intel machine from alternate media is highly dependent on the actual hardware and further information on this can be found in <Document 1003184.1>.

Steps 2-4 are platform independent.

Step 2 can be complicated by the number of storage methods that can host the dump device.

This document will discuss the the dump device residing on

• a disk slice
• a zvol
• Unfortunately, while it is possible to get access to the root filesystem on a Veritas Volume Manager (VxVM) datagroup, it is not possible to get access to any other volume (eg swap or dump) as the vxio drivers are not present on alternate installation media.

While the document title specifies CDROM, you could also boot from network media if you have it available.

Solution