Depending on the size of the tape, that could take a very long time. An erase isn't always a quick operation. If you think it might not be working properly, do a 'dmesg' while it's operating and see if any errors have come up (I'm mainly familiar with SCSI at this point, so your mileage may vary if you're using something else). You should also try a kill -HUP before jumping to kill -9. Making the process hang may've hosed you. I'm not sure what else you could do if those kills weren't enough. If your tape is external, try unplugging it and waiting a few minutes (I'd give it at least 10) to fail out with an I/O failure. If that doesn't work, you're probably stuck rebooting or possibly changing runlevel. -- Michael Vieths Foeclan at Winternet.Com On Tue, 24 Jul 2001, Carl Wilhelm Soderstrom wrote: > > mt -f /dev/nst0 erase > > > > no response. wait a bit. ps tells me it's dead. > > > > kill 22107 > > kill -9 22107 > > kill -KILL 22107 > > > > nothing. > > happens sometimes. I don't know exactly what the problem is; but I've seen > tape drives (and CD-ROM drives) hang processes like this. I suspect it's > something to do with taking too long to reply to a request. > > going to runlevel 1 (single-user) *may* fix the problem. it may fix this > instance of the problem; and then the device may not work at all, until you > reboot. Or it may work fine. > > electronic devices with moving parts suck. > > Carl Soderstrom > -- > Network Engineer > Real-Time Enterprises > (952) 943-8700 > _______________________________________________ > tclug-list mailing list > tclug-list at mn-linux.org > https://mailman.mn-linux.org/mailman/listinfo/tclug-list >