A broken connection inside the computer that causes "a hung/stuck state" (your title) normally freezes the whole compjuter. Since the computer isn't doing anything at all it won't execute any more instructions until it's rebooted. So it would never get to execute sqlite3_interrupt() or any other instruction. Hardware failure on a non-boot drive (e.g. if your Windows computer boots from C: but your database is stored on D: or E:) probably won't cause "a hung/stuck state". It's more likely to make SQLite return SQLITE_IOERR which your software can deal with however it likes. (The above explanation is oversimplified for brevity.)