1. A method for determining the criticality of a device during a hot-plug operation in a multi-path computer configuration comprising the steps of: traversing a directed acyclic graph representing a platform hierarchy during the hot-plug operation; determining paths within the directed acyclic graph affected by the hot-plug operation of the device; determining devices corresponding to each affected access path; determining devices that lose all their access paths; and determining usage in the system of at least the devices that lose all their access paths, wherein the usage of devices in the system is determined from attributes stored at the nodes of the directed acyclic graph and wherein the attributes comprise at least one of whether the device is a boot device, or whether the device is a quorum disk.