4.2 died on our VAX.

[Mike Williams]

Normally when UNIX panics we get a dump which we sometimes look at to
see what happened.

The other day our VAX just died. It continued to run, echoed text from
terminals etc. but just hung if you tried to give it any commands. It
turned out that one of our disk controllers was playing up. We swap and 
page on two disks (hp0 and hp1) and hp1 just gave up. This was quickly
repaired and we were up again after an hour.

Is there any way to force a dump in these conditions? Why did the VAX
just play dumb?

Mike Williams
{decvax,philabs}!mcvax!enea!erix!mike
or
mike at erix.UUCP