People always seem to want to stop an RWAST process, given the frequency of this question. But you can't do that safely, not even with kernel mode hacks. You need to take away the cause of the problem, and not attack the result, otherwise you may risk serious system instability (look at other operating systems....) There's always a reason for RWAST, and that is in 99% of the case a driver that does not complete an I/O request. Not because it does not want to, but because of something that's blocking it. In the case of tapes there can be very long timeouts involved, and until these expire the driver will wait. An erase or space command for example has a timeout of 5 hours enforced by MKdriver. Many other commands like read and write 10 minutes. So depending on what the unit was doing at the time of an error you might need to wait for 5 hours. If the drive has a hardware failure and stops responding it will take time to recover. And from a driver perspective, you can't predict all hardware failure scenarios, so it can always be a bug in the driver, from which I've seen my fair share. Notice that it can also be a problem in the portdriver (below MKdriver) that talks directly to the hardware.
Fwiw,
Jur.
