I have had a hard drive failure which has caused a lot of processes to go into an uninterruptable state ("D" state in ps
- See this question). I cannot kill these processes, so I wish to shut down, but unfortunately halt
is also now showing as "D" and the machine will not restart!
ben@jack:~$ ps aux | grep "halt"
root 7875 0.0 0.0 4148 700 ? S Mar08 0:00 /bin/sh /etc/rc0.d/S01halt stop
root 7880 0.0 0.0 10436 680 ? D Mar08 0:00 halt -d -f -i -p
How can I recover from this?
If your system has it enabled, you can probably use Magic SysRq to force a shutdown or reboot. Otherwise hopefully you have a network-accessible power supply you can log into? Then you can power-cycle the outlet the host is connected to.
Or maybe you have iLO or ipmi on the box, and you can log in to one of those to force a power cycle?
And of course as a last resort, it's time to send a flunky onsite.