Ray Phillips writes:

 > then the machine froze and I had to power cycle it.  It began to boot 
 > normally, but stopped near the end.  The final lines printed to the 
 > console were:
 > 
 > Configuring network interfaces: le0.
 > add net default: gateway 130.102.20.30
 > Adding interface aliases:
 > Building databases...
 > Starting syslogd.
 > Checking for core dump...
 > savecore: reboot after panic: kernel fault
 > savecore: system went down at Fri May 10 14:02:05 2002
 > savecore: writing compressed core to /var/crash/netbsd.1.core.Z
 > May 10 14:18:10 ap0 savecore: reboot after panic: kernel fault
 > 452004K
 > 
 > The number on the last line changed continuously, seemingly at 
 > random, until I power cycled the SS10 again, whereupon it got to the 
 > same point in the boot process and stuck in the same way.  

This is normal behavior after a panic. The kernel writes a memory
image to swap when it panics. On the next boot, "savecore" checks swap
to see if there's an image there, and dumps it to disk if it finds
one. The incrementing number is a running count of the number of bytes
written so far. 

Your machine would have booted normally if you'd waited until savecore
finished.

Dan
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