[PARPORT] What to do when ZIP drive freezes?


Juha Kivijarvi (juhkivij@monster.cs.utu.fi)
Tue, 21 Dec 1999 19:29:50 +0200


Hello!
I was hoping that someone on the list might be able to shed some light
on my problem.
I have a parallel port ZIP100 drive, which most of the time works just great.
However, it seems that the power cable is slowly coming to the end of its
lifespan, as sometimes when the drive is attached, the power goes out.
It can be fixed, though, just by pressing the plug. The question is:
how to get the drive back to the working state without rebooting?
There's usually a cp process going. Kill -9 has no effect on it.
Trying umount just results in another non-killable process. Rmmod refuses
to remove ppa (which is, by the way, loaded with modprobe), since
device is busy. The orange light is on but the drive makes no sound.
The eject button has no effect.
Removing and restoring the power of the ZIP drive turns the orange light
off and allows one to eject the disk. When using 2.0.34 kernel, this was
the only effect. After I updated to 2.2.13 (ppa 2.03), this also resulted
to freezing of keyboard and screen (which, however, has happened only once
so far).
Kern.log pointed out the following:

Dec 21 17:37:03 Noitalinna kernel: ppa: Parallel port cable is unplugged!!
Dec 21 17:37:34 Noitalinna last message repeated 30 times

Next comes several 'last message repeated' warnings more, then there
are some ^@:s (why?). And later (after turning ZIP power on & off):

Dec 21 18:07:21 Noitalinna kernel: SCSI disk error : host 1 channel 0 id 6 lun 0
 return code = 27010000
Dec 21 18:07:21 Noitalinna kernel: scsidisk I/O error: dev 08:04, sector 205

and repeating with different sectors.
So, is there a more sensible way to handle the situation than rebooting?
After all, this is the only reason I've had for rebooting save the
hardware installments. I probably should also have mentioned that the
parallel port is in EPP mode.

                                                Juha Kivijärvi
                                                juhkivij@utu.fi

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This archive was generated by hypermail 2.0b3 on Tue 21 Dec 1999 - 12:40:11 EST