"busy" disk trouble

Michal Jaegermann michal at harddata.com
Fri Sep 29 22:28:01 UTC 2006


I wonder if anybody else have seen something like that.

I have a disk, a rather sizeable one, on which just was written a
partition table and it looks like that:

Disk /dev/sdb: 250.0 GB, 250059350016 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 30401 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sdb1               1       30401   244196001   83  Linux

No problems so far.  Now I am trying to create a file system
on this.

#  mke2fs -j /dev/sdb1
mke2fs 1.39 (29-May-2006)
/dev/sdb1 is apparently in use by the system; will not make a
filesystem here!

??? Neither fuser, nor lsof, nor searches for anything else reveal
why /dev/sdb1 could be "in use".  OK, lets try to force the issue

# mke2fs -F -j /dev/sdb1
mke2fs 1.39 (29-May-2006)
/dev/sdb1 is apparently in use by the system; mke2fs forced anyway.
/dev/sdb1: Device or resource busy while setting up superblock

If I will try "strace" the above then I can only see:

stat("/dev/sdb1", {st_mode=S_IFBLK|0640, st_rdev=makedev(8, 17), ...}) = 0
open("/dev/sdb1", O_RDONLY|O_EXCL)      = -1 EBUSY (Device or resource busy)

and I am not much wiser.  It does not appear that anythying on
initrd or udev is really holding to /dev/sdb or /dev/sdb1, or at
least not in some obvious manner.

Actually I started trying to add that disk to LVM, and with no
partitioning at all, but 'pvcreate' also refuses to do anythning
because this disk is "busy" (while 'fdisk' was happy to oblidge).

If instead of rawhide I will boot some older distro on the same
hardware then 'mke2fs' does not have problems with the same
partition.  Any ideas what is going on here?  Makes adding
a disk space to an installation somewhat "interesting".

Oh, this disk shows as /dev/sdb as this is a SATA device.

   Michal




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