[CentOS] scsi tape drive problems

Mon Sep 26 20:17:02 UTC 2005
James B. Byrne <ByrneJB at Harte-Lyne.ca>

I am experimenting with a scsi2 HP SureStore DAT24 attached as an 
external device to an Intel P4 system.  I am attempting to create a 
raw disk image of a dds2 tape made on a non linux system.

My immediate problem is that I am trying to terminate a dd process 
and having no luck.  dd was invoked thus:

dd if=/dev/nst1 of=/tmp/disk.dds2.img bs=512 & pid=$!

a ps reveals this:

ps
  PID TTY          TIME CMD
 1936 pts/0    00:00:00 bash
 2034 pts/0    00:00:15 dd
 2093 pts/0    00:00:00 ps

a call to kill has no apparent effect:

kill -s SIGKILL 2034
ps
  PID TTY          TIME CMD
 1936 pts/0    00:00:00 bash
 2034 pts/0    00:00:18 dd
 2100 pts/0    00:00:00 ps

and calls to mt show this:

mt -f /dev/nst1 status
/dev/nst1: Device or resource busy


Short of a reboot, how do I get control of the tape drive back?  
(once I get the drive back I will have a lot of other questions 
regarding dd.)

Regards,
Jim

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