[CentOS] scsi tape drive problems

Mon Sep 26 20:29:28 UTC 2005
Joshua Baker-LePain <jlb17 at duke.edu>

On Mon, 26 Sep 2005 at 4:17pm, James B. Byrne wrote

> 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

That dd command will continue until it hits an EOF (I believe -- maybe 
EOD).  Until then, it'll be in the 'D' state (waiting for I/O), and 
therefore unkillable.  You'll just have to wait it out (or, as you 
conjectured, reboot).  Is the tape drive reading (and, correspondingly, 
the disk writing)?

-- 
Joshua Baker-LePain
Department of Biomedical Engineering
Duke University