Diagnostic memory images are obtained from a computer system when a system freezes or fails to take a memory dump when otherwise needed. A computer system provides an improved mechanism for obtaining a memory dump of the contents of the memory associated with the particular computing system when a system freeze or crash occurs. The computing system may also correspond to a software partition running within a computing system. A software partition corresponds to a subset of the hardware under control of an instance of an operation system executing on a full computer system.