>I just had a hard-drive hang that had tied up a task
>doing disk I/O (it seems to have failed a 'wake-up'
>from the power down state)  - I  tried the "Reset"
>pushbutton but the HD was still hung after reboot
>(this HD was on the 2nd IDE controller) ... it finally
>took powering down to 'clear' whatever it was that was
>'hung' in the HD ...

Much laughter. When I was doing mainframe support we had a bunch of SCSI
disks that would hang the whole mainframe. The symptom was the mainframe
would slowly grind to a halt as it filled its buffers with disk I/O queue.
The solution was for the engineer to go and pull the disk drive at fault, at
which point the error handling code would take over, decide to report a hard
error, and then get on with the job by marking that drive off line and
getting back to work.

Mind you we were in the fortunate position of having drives with multiple
mirrors for system reliability, so pulling a hot-swap drive was not a
problem.

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