Method and apparatus for continuing to provide processing on disk outages

A system and method for continuing to provide processing in a processing system is disclosed. In one embodiment, a processing system is provided comprising a secondary storage device, a memory, a processor, an operating system, and a plurality of processes stored in the secondary data storage device. The plurality of processes comprise a first group of processes and a second group of processes. The first group of processes is adapted to be swapped between the secondary data storage device and the memory for execution. The second group of processes is adapted to be locked into the memory of the processing system during operation. The request to lock and unlock a process is affected by a watchdog process unrelated to the process being locked. Configuration information for the watchdog process identifies the processes in the first and/or second groups.