Poor form to anwser my own question but
I removed and inspected the IDE cables... found one with some damage - I
suspect this is the
cause.
Happend to get a Promise TX2000 raid card yesterday , so I reinstalled
(+ new cables).
Retesting the scenario finds that iostat is not blocked.
regar
I am running Freebsd 5.1 on a Dell 410 with 2xPII and 2xIDE drives (each
on its own channel).
Drive #1 as 1 filesystem mounted on /, drive #2 has 1 filesystem,
mounted on /data1
(both have softupdates enabled)
i) start a process doing some io on drive #1
ii) start iostat 5
iostat blocks until
