# Help troubleshooting kernel panics



## chiefbodge (Jul 13, 2009)

I've been using and appreciating Freebsd in my small production hosting environment for 4 years now and never had to deal with hardware faults before but the time has come:

Hardware: HP DL360 G4P 2 x 3.6ghz 2 x 146gb SCSI
OS: Freebsd 7.1-Release

This server was working great for a few months and then suddenly started to panic on bootup, even when booting off the FreeBSD cd. Tried with only one hard disk inserted at a time and still panics.

I then moved the disks to a different server (HP DL380 G4P same config) and it continued to panic except that when one of the disks was removed it didn't panic (so one disk was causing the panic and the other was not). But in the DL380 when it did panic it was specifically related to file system corruption unlike in the previous server where there were many different panics.

With the single disk in the DL380 everything was reliable for 2 weeks or so and then this morning the machine panicked again. Unfortunately I couldn't read the panic as it was off screen, I rebooted and the machine panicked a few minutes later, again couldn't read it as it was off screen.

My question is: how can you view the last panic information in FreeBSD and what would you do in my situation? the only thing that is consistent between configurations is one hard disk.


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## chiefbodge (Jul 13, 2009)

I have found out about /var/crash which is very useful.

My initial crashes were: 

```
Panic String: ffs_blkfree: freeing free block
```

With the faulty disk.

This mornings panics were:


```
NMI indicates hardware failure
```

I'm guessing these are unrelated, is there any way I can dig deeper to find out what is causing the latest panic?


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