On Sat, Aug 10, 2019 at 03:11:03PM -0400, fsmithred via Dng wrote:
> On 8/10/19 2:51 PM, Hendrik Boom wrote:
> > Sorry for this post. There is trouble, but the details are all wrong.
> > I was upgrading a machine that was differet from the machine I thought
> > I was upgrading. Given that, it's no surprise that it appeared to be
> > upgrading ascii instead of beowulf, or that it had problems with gpt
> > disks -- there are gpt disks.
> >
> > The real problem is that it seems to be unable to write to several
> > sectors at the start of device /dev/sdb. I have no idea why, but it
> > keeps retrying for hours and hours. Currently it's stuck trying to
> > write to sector 51. This is while doing something to grub in the
> > course of the upgrade.
> >
> > Anyone know how I can
> >
> > stop it from retrying? By now retrying is
> > useless.
>
> ctrl-c?

This worked:

    killall grub-mkconfig grub-probe

Of course, this means that this part of the upgrade did not complete.
The messages about failing i/o on that sector went on after the kill, but
eventually stopped. I think the kernel continued retrying to
exhaustion, but when the kernel gave up, there was no longer
any process saying to try again. All in all, it had been retrying for
something like 24 hours.

-- hendrik