VMS pause before banner.

[John Welsh_2]

Hi Guys, Maybe someone can help me on this.
We have a VAX7740 with 2GB memory running V7.2.
When the system boots it pauses for over
3 minutes before the VMS banner is printed out.
The system prints out:
".....Savedump parameter not set to protect the
PAGEFILE.SYS" before the pause. Once booted
everything comes up as normal.
Is this a problem or a non-problem considering
the amount of memory present ?
Thanks in advance - John Welsh.

[Craig A]

John

You need to see what SYSTARTUP_VMS.COM is doing. It may be, for example, capturing the system startup to a log file(s) so that there could be very minimal output on the console until such time as the boot has finished.

Craig

[tsgdavid]

John,
Do you have a SYSDUMP file on your system? It sounds like you are using the PAGEFILE.SYS as a dump file. If you have enough space on the system disk, you may want to create a SYSDUMP.DMP file.

You can use the command @SYS$UPDATE:SWAPFILES to create the file

In SYSGEN you can get help on the system parameters with HELP SYS_PARAM. Look at the parameters DUMPSTYLE and SAVEDUMP.

If you don't want to create a dump file, you should decide whether you want the dump to be saved in the event of a system crash. That is what SAVEDUMP is for.

David Williams

[tsgdavid]

John

If you are not familiar with the dump file and how to size it, here is another thread with some very good information

http://h30499.www3.hp.com/t5/System-Management/calculating-sysdump-dmp-size/m-p/4333553#M22957

Dave

[H.Becker]

The dots in ".....Savedump" translate to "%SYSBOOT-I-SYSBOOT " (and it seems it is really SAVEDUMP). So this message is from SYSBOOT.EXE. The banner is from the routine EXE$INIT in EXEC_INIT.EXE. Compare pages 919 to 928 in the IDS V5.2.

The pause has nothing to do with a dump in PAGEFILE.SYS. The message just informs the operator, that the system parameter SAVEDUMP is not set and that any dump in the PAGEFILE will be overwritten by paging. (If SAVEDUMP is set, SDA is the tool to copy the dump and to release the saved dump data for subsequent paging. But there are no processes yet, nor a $ prompt to run SDA.)

EXE$INIT prints the banner immediately after initializing the console terminal.

What usually happens between these messages? More or less loading the exec images from the system disk, passing control to EXE$INIT, which turns on memory management and calls the EXEC initialization routines, sets up data structures for secondary CPUs. Just read the book. OK, it is a little bit out of date for 7.2 and a 7740.

What bootflags do you have in R5? Any disk activity during the pause, at the begining or at the end? You can always crash the system during that time and look at the dump (but don't forget to boot conversational and set SAVEDUMP :-). Before you crash the system you probably want to collect some PCs. Sounds like a fun project. What a pity that I have no longer access to the real documentation.

[abrsvc]

This symptom sounds remarkably familiar. We had a similar instance when the Polarstar was a prototype (VAX8800). The memory test bit was set and this was the first machine that could actually have 512Mb of main memory. It was the memory test that was executing. Setting the bit s to skip the test, allowed the system to boot in record time...

Check that too.
Dan

[John Welsh_2]

Hi guys, Thanks for taking the trouble to
reply. SYSTARTUP_VMS occurs after the VMS
banner so something in there is not the problem.
This is a VAX7000 and there is no inhibit
memory test function at the console and also there is no sysgen parameter with a similar
function.
The problem turned out to be one of the CPU
modules faulty. Once that was replaced there
is now less than 10 seconds between the
SYSBOOT message and the VMS Banner.
Once again thanks for the assistance.

[John Welsh_2]

Problem solved.....