device completely blocked

device completely blocked

[Andreas Moroder]

Hello,

we removed a 20 files from a directory. The rm does never end and all 
other processes that try to write to the same device are blocked.
This happen two to three times a year to our hospital server. The 
problem is that it is hard to find a time to shut down this server.

There is no way to kill the processes that access this devices. Is there 
a way to solve this problem without shuting down the machine ?
Does umount -f work on local reiserfc filesystems ?

Thanks
Andreas