panic, but /var/crash ist empty

[Helmut Schneider]

Helmut 'Ingrid' Schneider wrote:

> running 8.2-RELEASE-p1 within VMWare ESXi 4.1-u1 I want to use raw
> devices as hard disks. I create the devices using this link:
> 
> http://www.mattiasholm.com/node/33
> 
> I tried 3 different hard drives (Seagate 2x80GB and 1x400GB SATA2)
> which are fine on a physical machine. I also ran Seatool many hours on
> all of them without errors.
> 
> I can partiton the disks and create a few files/directories on it. But
> as soon as I copy a larger number of files to those disks (tried with
> MBR and GPT) the VM reboots instantly (I tried cp, dump/restore and
> rsync). No "Rebooting within 15 seconds", just snap. I think I can
> see an panic but I'm not sure, it's too fast.
> 
> (as far as I can see most of the times the data on the first UFS slice
> (and only the first UFS slice!) of the partition gets severly
> corrupted, most of the time all that is left are a few files within
> lost+found. Sometimes all the labels are gone but are recoverable
> using bsdlabel -R)
> 
> The problem is that /var/crash remains empty.
> 
> What can I do to create a backtrace to open a PR?

FWIW:

While a sysinstall from CD (tried 8.0, 8.1 and 8.2) also dies short
before the end of the installation, Ubuntu 10.4 (EXT4), Windows 7 and
OpenBSD install fine and also do not die when copying a lots of
files... :(