Hi all.
I currently have a massive problem with my main webserver: one of the SCSI drives where I keep my htdocs seems to have failed (sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] Result: hostbyte=DID_NO_CONNECT driverbyte=DRIVER_OK,SUGGEST_OK
end_request: I/O error, dev sda, sector 7797601
).
Since I have no backup (dumb!dumb!dumb!) of it, I tried to copy what I could on the fly, but that failed miserably. The next idea was to umount the volume and try remounting it R-O, but I have a bunch of apache2 processes that are apparently reading/writing on it and I can't seem to find any way of terminating them.
I tried via init script, killall and kill -9 but they just don't respond. Until I can terminate those processes, I won't be able to unmount the drive and try saving what's left of the data.
Oh and the cherry on top of the cake: the server is 1100 miles away so I can't even access it physically..
Is there any way I didn't think of to get rid of those apache processes?

Thanks

Hmm...I'm sure you've tried all of this, but:

kill -9 <pid> <pid>....<pid> (all the PID's of Apache).
kill -9 <parent pid of apache> <pid>...<pid> (all the rest of the apache pids.
service stop apache2

The kill -9 will usually work, but it may be in an odd state, since you've got dying hardware. Did you try to force unmount the disk? NOTE: that MAY corrupt the data, though, use with caution since you don't have a backup...