I used the system with a 2GB memory so that /proc/vmcore would be less than 4G. (and I would use the readelf I had from the binutils) Enter shell command >ls -l /proc/vmcore -r-------- 1 0 0 2006283756 Apr 5 02:15 /proc/vmcore cp /proc/vmcore /local/local1/crash/vmcore-incomplete Enter shell command >ls -l /local/local1/crash/ total 1810340 -r-------- 1 0 0 1989877760 Apr 4 05:01 vmcore-incomplete The cp on vmcore failed at file size was 1989877760 bytes. (i.e 0x769B2000 ).