Hi, Damian, RE: > You have three options: > o Wait for it to finish on its own (may never happen if it's trying to > access a hardware device that no longer exists). Indeed, this never happens. And in the meantime, it allocates the tape drive, and the tape can not be ejected. And we need to continue with reading in data from another tape... In fact, the problem is somewhat misterious. We issued tar tvf /dev/nst0 without specifying the blocksize, such as tar tvf /dev/nst0 -b 1024 > o Ignore it -- it's not using resources anyway. It does, as i mentioned above. mt -f /dev/nst0 offline or anything else do not work. > o Kill its parent. In your case, the parent is init, so this is > equivalent to rebooting. And this is what finally we resorted to. It is a pity that such situations can happen where a'la windoz style, the only thing that helps is reboot. I am not used to that... Gaspar
