Last week I downloaded a MS bugpack, 130MB, burnt it on a cd-rw and deleted it from my hd. Then the cd-rw turned out to be faulty. Never mind, I'll just copy the first (ok) 110MB to hd and restart the download, saves me some time and bandwidth. Haha (to both).
Insert disk, cp /media/cdrom/file /tmp/file The first 112MB are fine, then it hangs on some dud CD sector(s). All disk I/O dead, not just to the cdrom drive, also to the hd on the same cable as the cdrom, as well as to the hd on a different cable. To be precise, every 10s or so it recovered for 1-2s. Shells were still running, ps was fine, so I thought I just kill the process now and get on with it. No way. kill -9 to the PID of cp didn't even turn it into a zombie. Obviously it's stuck in the IDE driver, and ^C or most (all?) other signals can only be applied at certain times, e.g. when there's actual I/O happening. There's nothing else that could be done - forcefully opening the cdrom tray with a pin is probably not a good idea, other than the cp there was nothing to kill. Probably the cdrom drive is hogging the ide bus as well when there are read difficulties, but that's to be expected to some extend. I stuffed around for a few minutes, but as I didn't know for how long this was going to continue, I thought this is Linux with journalling file systems and hit reset, mumbling something non-complimentory about I/O device drivers which assume no I/O ever goes wrong. Adding insult to injury, after the reboot it turned out that download.microsoft.com doesn't support restarting of http downloads (at least wget -c spat a dummy). And I thought they were outsourced to Akamai and running on Linux. Volker -- Volker Kuhlmann is possibly list0570 with the domain in header http://volker.dnsalias.net/ Please do not CC list postings to me.
