/dev/sda1 apparently is in use

[Bill Campbell]

On Tue, May 29, 2007, Net Llama! wrote:
>On Tue, 29 May 2007, Vu Pham wrote:
>> On Tue, 2007-05-29 at 09:59 -0500, Net Llama! wrote:
>>> On Tue, 29 May 2007, Vu Pham wrote:
>>>> When installing Suse 10.2 onto a new system, after creating the
>>>> partitions, the installation comes to the step to format the partitions,
>>>> I get the error that /dev/sda1 is apparently in use and the installation
>>>> stops.
>>>>
>>>> Moving another drive already installed Suse 10.2 to this system, it
>>>> boots just fine.
>>>>
>>>> Moving the first drive to another system, the installation goes without
>>>> any error.
>>>>
>>>> The motherboard of the new system is Intel Desktop D765XBX2; its BIOS
>>>> was flashed to the latest one 05/23/07.
>>>
>>> Are you able to delete all partitions off of /dev/sda ?  Are you sure that
>>> /dev/sda is your harddisk and not hte CDROM drive?
>>>
>> Yes. I could manually fdisk /dev/sda, delete the created partitions,
>> save new configuration, then add new partitions again, and save them
>> without any error.
>>
>> I use an external USB DVD drive and its device is /dev/sr0 or something
>> like that but definitely not /dev/sda
>
>I very much doubt that.  Every USB disk I've ever used in the past 2 years 
>is treated like a normal SCSI drive.  I think you're confusing /dev/sda 
>which is the USB drive with /dev/sdb, which is your HDD.

Having hot-pluggable USB or Firewire devices on a system can make life
``interesting'' although I've never seen cases where real SCSI drives
weren't detected before the pluggable devices.

If I had to make a SWAG on this, I would guess that the SCSI module(s)
aren't being loaded before it checks for USB and Firewire.  Using an
appropriate ``insmod $scsimod'' in the ``info'' file or at the initial
install prompt would probably fix this if that's the case.

Bill
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