Re: System Hung

On 23 Apr 2012 10:30, Jerry C. Adams wrote:

Guess I waited too long, Chuck. Our V5R1 machine has three options
under the MSD Manager. The first one (Work with current main
storage dump (MSD) residue) only says "Main storage dump not
present." The second one (Work with copies of main storage dumps)
brings up an empty list.

Rather than having "waited too long", presumably having failed to [err... opting not to have effected a] "copy MSD to disk [or tape]" as part of diagnostic actions to be performed after the system had "dumped main storage"; e.g. as with [IIRC is done for] the forced option-3=IPL from the panel. When no prior MSD had been copied to disk, none are presented in the list.

The third one (Work with copy options) wants to make copies and
re-IPL; I don't think so. .-)

During the manual IPL after the effective crash, i.e. after the forced IPL with panel option-03, the "Work with copy options" would have been the option chosen, ideally then when storage is available to have chosen copy MSD to disk, and finally continue with the currently initiated IPL.

The Service Action Log is empty.

Not sure what a SAL is. The PAL is the Product Activity Log; while it may have something of interest, more likely the VLogs would. The VLic Log is the Verical Licensed Internal Code Log. That is almost surely not empty... because minimal log sizes I am confident would disallow an empty log, and the logging is pervasive; so much so, the most common situation is loss of the logs due to wrapping headers or data, per too restrictive settings.

When both the MSD is not available and vlogs are lacking, poring over the history log and joblogs for jobs that were active when the system was forced down [possibly produced at end of the IPL] is sometimes fruitful; although rarely in my experience, for an apparent hard-loop. If vlogs are lacking, I always bump up the settings to allow much more data [even if no more headers] so something should be there /next time/ something bad occurs.

Regards, Chuck