[conspire] having trouble getting 2nd partition formatted with GNU parted

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Darlene Wallach (freepalestin at dslextreme.com):

> I unmounted /dev/sdb:
[...]
> Here is my attempt to set up two partitions on the Seagate FreeAgent
> Go 1T drive.
> Partiton 1 gets setup - notice even though I said to start at "0",
> parted started at "17.4kB".
> Partition 2 - I get errors - I don't understand what I'm doing wrong.
> Should I shutdown, reboot and try again for partition 2?
> Does someone see what I'm doing wrong for partition 2?
[...]
> (parted) mkpart primary ext3 960GB 1000GB Error: Error informing the
> kernel about modifications to partition /dev/sdb2 -- Device or
> resource busy.

I don't fully understand that, myself.  You might be able to use "lsof"
(list open files) to find out what's keeping that resource busy.
_However_, what I'd do is what I pretty nearly always do when I want to
do partitioning:  Haul out my favourite live CD, boot it, and use it as
my partitioning environment.

Currently, for me that's Sidux, but there are plenty of others.

Or you _could_ just reboot.  That'd be especially likely to work if, say, you
specify runlevel 1 (single-user) at the GRUB prompt.  Or something like
that.