[Info-vax] Not getting a dump file when VMS crashes

[David Froble]

Henry Crun wrote:
> On 03/04/12 01:49, David Froble wrote:
>> Ok, I should know more than I am remembering. Take pity on a senile 
>> old man, if
>> you know the answer(s). Don't bother looking it up if you don't, I can 
>> still
>> read. Just hoping for a simple answer.
>>
>> Got a VAXstation 4000 model 90A running VMS V7.2. Recently it has been 
>> crashing.
>> I had been thinking it might be power related, there were some 
>> incidents where
>> other stuff also went down, but now it's happening maybe once or twice 
>> a week to
>> only the VAXstation.
>>
>> So Ok, I'll look at the crash dump, right? Unfortunately, what I'm 
>> getting is:
>>
>> $ ana/crash
>> _Dump File: sys$system:sysdump.dmp
>>
>> OpenVMS (TM) VAX System dump analyzer
>>
>> %SDA-W-VAXDUMP, dump file FLAGS2 DMP$V_VAXDUMP should be set
>> %SDA-E-DUMPEMPTY, dump file contains no valid dump
>>
>> Perhaps someone who knows what the above means can save me some eye 
>> strain?
>>
>> I have DUMPSTYLE set to 2
> 
> Two suspects:
> a) Sudden death (possibly momentary) of the power supply
> b) System disk going offline/disconnect/whatever
> 
> 

I'm getting real close to settling on "a"

It acts like what you'd expect by pulling the plug.

I'm not a hardware guy.  I can sort of use a multi-meter, but that's about as far as it 
goes.  Having a flakey power supply in one of these old systems has always been a nightmare.