Arch Linux

Sheep Dude

Member

Registered: 2025-09-23

Posts: 1

nvmes partitions cannot be formatted

I am entirely new to Linux. I am on an MSI laptop. Inside this laptop I have a single NVME which I have split into a partition with Windows installed and ~40 GiB for Arch. On this arch partition, it has been further split into a Linux root partition, an EFI system partition, and a Linux Swap Partition. When I try to format any partition, with the commands provided on the wiki (EX: # mkfs.ext4 /dev/root_partition) I am given the following error, "/dev/nvme0n1p7 is apparently in use by the system; will not make a filesystem here!" or "cannot open /dev/efi or swap partition: Device or resource busy". I checked with the command "lsblk -f" to see if any of them are in use, but they do not have a FSTYPE, FSVER, LABEL, or UUID yet. These are all new partitions, completely unused. I've deleted them and remade them multiple times to no avail.

A friend suggested I try cat /proc/mounts, so I uploaded the SS along with others to more easily show my issues to Imgur if anyone knows if that will be useful: https://imgur.com/a/Zr46nRb

Does anyone know how I can fix this issue and make my partitions usable?

Head_on_a_Stick

Member

From: The Wirral

Registered: 2014-02-20

Posts: 8,999

Website

Re: nvmes partitions cannot be formatted

Have you disabled Windows' "Fast Startup"? https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Dual_b … ibernation

Note that it is generally recommended to share the extant ESP created by Windows rather than make a new one for Arch.

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seth

Member

From: Don't DM me only for attention

Registered: 2012-09-03

Posts: 69,096

Re: nvmes partitions cannot be formatted

I have split into a partition with Windows installed and ~40 GiB for Arch. On this arch partition, it has been further split into a Linux root partition

How exactly did you split a partition into more partitions?
Don't run fdisk on partitions.

fdisk -l | curl -F 'file=@-' 0x0.st

Also you're gonna need *one* ESP (which you probably already have if there's a booting windows) and w/ 40GB total you probably don't want to split root and home partition, nor do you want a boot partition nor a swap partition (but conditionally use a swap file you can replace at random will) - 40GB isn't much these days unless you intend to run a bare bones system.

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frostschutz

Member

Registered: 2013-11-15

Posts: 1,573

Re: nvmes partitions cannot be formatted

Does this persist across reboots?

Are there any entries in /proc/swaps? swapoff --all might help then.

There are quite a lot of things that can flag a device as in use, and there is no single command to check all of them.