Multipath on Kenno's Open Note

mkfs.xfs: cannot open /dev/sda1: Device or resource busy

Sun, 13 Mar 2022 20:10:03 +1100

I’m trying to create an XFS filestem on a used disk, and got into a problem. Here is the error message:

# mkfs.xfs /dev/sda1
mkfs.xfs: cannot open /dev/sda1: Device or resource busy

So, let’s see if I can fix it. (Spoiler alert: I think I can, even though it’s not yet done at the time of this writing.)

Let’s check the partitions of /dev/sda:

# parted /dev/sda print
Model: ATA ST1000LM014-1EJ1 (scsi)
Disk /dev/sda: 1000GB
Sector size (logical/physical): 512B/4096B
Partition Table: gpt
Disk Flags:

Number  Start   End    Size   File system  Name  Flags
 1      1049kB  512GB  512GB  ntfs         1

So, there is a partition (/dev/sda1) with 512GB in size, and its filesystem is ntfs. I was pretty sure that I had selected xfs as the filesystem.

Blacklisting Local Disk from Multipath

Sun, 28 Jan 2018 23:43:03 +0000

In my previous post, I wrote about my quest to identify a disk presented by the Dell server itself. At the end of the post, I mentioned that I should be able to resume with creating a LVM volume on the new disk. LVM stands for Logical Volume Management. There is a good tutorial available at this page if you’re interested in – How To Use LVM To Manage Storage Devices on Ubuntu 16.04.

How to identify a disk on a Dell server

Wed, 24 Jan 2018 13:37:14 +0000

I have a Dell R730 server at work, which connects to a back-end storage with optical fiber cables. In addition, the server itself also has 6 disks. Two of the disks have already been configured as RAID1 and has the operating system installed on it.

Today, I want to configure the remaining 4 disks as RAID10, and setup logical volume on it. The first part was easy. All I had to do was to login to the Integrated Dell Remote Access Controller (iDRAC), and create a new Virtual Disk from the 4 physical disks. The second part is a bit tricky. As the server is connected to the stroage server, it sees a lot of disks.