I'm manually installing Arch on a BIOS-based system and keep getting errors that /dev/sda1, /dev/sda2, and /dev/sda3 are in use, so I can't format them with mkfs. The partitions aren't mounted, I've confirmed I'm working on the correct drive rather than the USB installer, and I've already run swapoff -a. Even wipefs reports "device or resource busy." What could still be holding the partitions open?
1 Answer
Check whether another fdisk or partitioning program is still running. In this case, suspended fdisk sessions were holding the disk open, which made the partitions appear busy even though they weren’t mounted. Exit or terminate those sessions, then retry the formatting or wipefs commands.
That was it—some other suspended fdisk sessions were blocking the disk. Closing them fixed the problem.