Exabyte unavailable after dump killed - war story & workaround

[Rich Morin]

Exabyte unavailable after dump killed - war story & workaround

I occasionally need to kill a dump on my Exabyte 8200 (Sun-3, SunView,
SunOS 4.1.1).  Hitting ^C stops dump, and prints out a query:

  DUMP: NEEDS ATTENTION: Do you want to abort dump?: ("yes" or "no")

It also prints a prompt, however, as it has returned me to the shell.
(Typing yes at this point is therefore less than useful ;-).

In any event, I am then unable to use the drive.  It seems that dump
leaves a bunch of TW processes lying around, which must be killed off
before the drive can be used.  This is no big deal, once you know
about it, but *nothing* else (short of rebooting) works, and it can
get very frustrating, to say the least.  With SunOS for Sun-3's frozen
at 4.1.1, I don't expect a fix, but this discussion and workaround may
be of use to some other schlunk...

  _ o  _ |_     _ _   _   _ o  _       Rich Morin, Canta Forda Computer Lab.
 |  | |  | |   | | | | | |  | | |      UNIX consulting, training and writing
 |  | |_ | |   | | | |_| |  | | |      cfcl!rdm at apple.com    +1 415 873 7841