Mark Knecht writes: > On Wed, Oct 7, 2009 at 12:48 PM, Neil Bothwick <n...@digimed.co.uk> wrote: > > On Wed, 7 Oct 2009 18:39:45 +0200, Alex Schuster wrote: > >> Others allow to kill processes, sync the filesystem, and such. The > >> combination Alt-SysRq-R-E-I-S-U-B reboots a hanging PC without file > >> system corruption. > > > > Usually! Sometimes a system can be locked up to badly that there's not > > enough resources left to sync the filesystems. Most of the time though > > Alt-SysRq-Reboot-Even-If-System-Utterly-Broken works.
Right, I was a little too enthusiastic here. > I've seen you guys talk about this and I've never had to use it. Oh. I used it very often. > I'm curious about the actual key strokes. Is it > > Alt-SysRq and then REISUB > > or > > Alt-SysRq followed by Atl-R, Atl-E, etc.. ? It's Alt-SysRq-R, Alt-SysRq-E, and so on. With little pauses between, to give the action some time to work. Like, wait a little with the U (Unmount) after the S (Sync). Or after the E (kill all processes) in order to give the processes some time to save data, so the I (kill -9 all processes) does not interrupt this. Wonko