[geeks] Zombie Disk Sleep

[Big Endian]

>I'm not following you here...
>
>Your hard drive sleeping after a period of inactivity?
>
>If so, are you sure it's linux doing it?  How about your BIOS?  I've 
>not had any problems with any of my linux servers, but I make sure 
>the BIOS power management is disabled.
>
Nono... a process was reading from tape, there was a race condition 
or something in that both the tape drive and the program were waiting 
for the other to respond.  The program was in "Uninteruptible Disk 
Sleep"  (blocked while waiting for the tape to spit something back). 
You can't even kill -9 that program, its there, and the tape drive is 
locked until reboot.  Its an evil problem, one I've yet to see fixed. 
I've not run into it for a LONG time and I'm wondering if anybody 
ever found a way to kill that process.

daniel