: I tried a number of things to get it to retry those commands (sync, umount,
: retrying the file, etc)
: This can be quickly reproduced if you have a junk SCSI disk and are willing
: to possibly blow it: You can pull the plug on the disk, then plug it in
: again... this will give you the "Logical unit is in process of becoming
: ready" condition until it has spun up again. Unfortunatly, I don't have
: a disk I can play with... and now that the failing disk has enough air
: I havn't seen it again. In this case, the hardware wasn't TOTALLY at fault...
: we have an error condition that is quite possible to recover from, but was
: locked in some sort of error loop.
I've had the same sort of problem... I have a laptop with an external
Syquest drive. Our power is a bit flaky, and there have been a couple
times when it briefly went out, and the laptop stayed up thanks to its
batteries, but the temporary unavailability of the Syquest caused lots
of problems. Once in this state, a clean shutdown was impossible.
-- Dave Hinds
dhinds@hyper.stanford.edu