3B2/400 HD#1 hangup?

[Jeff Hakner]

	We have four 3B2/400s.  Our newest, and most 
heavily loaded unit has been crashing a bit more 
often than I care for.  It seems as if integral hard
disk #1, which contains the /usr and /usr3 file systems,
is becoming not ready.  Shells continue to run, but logins
are not possible.  Any attempt to access /usr or /usr3 files
hangs the process, for example, df shows / and /usr2, which
are on integral HD#0, but hangs after that.  Our devices:
3B2/400 4MB.
Two 72 Meg HDs (internal)
SCSI 60Meg cart. tape
SCSI host adapter, controller, 1 external SCSI HD.
EPORTS 
3BNET
Interestingly, our older, non-SCSI 3B2s, identical in all
other respects, have never had this crash.
	At any rate, my *REAL* question is this:  I know how
to take a crash dump to floppies, but at 4MBytes main store,
this would take 15-45 minutes, which is prohibitive.  
Is there a way to make a crash dump partition on one of the
HDs, and then take the dump on that?
	Any thoughts would be greatly appreciated.
Jeff Hakner
Cooper Union Computer Center
hak at meagan.cooper.edu
hak%meagan.cooper.edu at CMCL2.NYU.EDU