I'm manually installing Arch Linux on a BIOS-based system and can't format the partitions on /dev/sda. Tools report that /dev/sda1, /dev/sda2, and /dev/sda3 are in use, even though none of them appear to be mounted. I verified that I'm working on the correct drive rather than the installation USB, ran lsblk several times, disabled swap with swapoff -a, and also tried wipefs, which returned "device or resource busy." What could be keeping the partitions locked?
1 Answer
First, check the drive layout with `fdisk -l /dev/sda` and look for anything that might still be active. In this case, the partitions were being held by other suspended fdisk sessions. Closing those leftover sessions released the device, after which the partitions could be changed and formatted normally.
That was the issue—some other fdisk sessions had been suspended and were still holding the device. I closed them and everything worked.