I can't unmount and reformat a hard drive

I have 2 drives in my pc, the first one is SSD with linux and important files on it, and the 2nd one is an HDD with fuseblk file system and strange behaviour

I wanted to unmount the second drive, reformat it and use it as steam library folder
But when i tried to unmount it, that’s happened:

$ sudo umount /dev/sdb       
[sudo] password for qwerty: 
umount: /dev/sdb: not mounted.

I also can’t reformat it:

$ sudo mkfs.ext4 /dev/sdb     
mke2fs 1.46.5 (30-Dec-2021)
/dev/sdb is apparently in use by the system; will not make a filesystem here!

But it still… detected by the file manager? Although, in fact, i can’t delete/create any file or folder on this drive, so it still unusable

So… how can i reformat it already and begin to use as a file dumpster?

P.S. It may be relevant to the case:
I used to have errors on this drive when i was using windows: files often became corrupted and unavailable, so i think drive can be faulty a bit :confused:
Nevertheless, DOTA was succesfully working on it

You unmount actual directory where disk is mounted and not the device itself.

/dev/sdb is your drive. The drive itself is never mounted directly — or at least, not in any normal case — but instead you create partitions on the drive, and it is the partition(s) that you mount.

That’s a good thing, because you would have ruined the entire drive.

Check which partition is mounted on that drive… :arrow_down:

mount | grep sdb

Once you know which partition it is, make sure that you don’t have any file manager open on that partition, or any program reading from that partition. Only then can you reformat it.

You may also want to read these two tutorials below… :arrow_down:

2 Likes

This topic was automatically closed 2 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.