"busy" disk trouble

I wonder if anybody else have seen something like that. I have a disk, a rather sizeable one, on which just was written a partition table and it looks like that: Disk /dev/sdb: 250.0 GB, 250059350016 bytes 255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 30401 cylinders Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System /dev/sdb1 1 30401 244196001 83 Linux No problems so far. Now I am trying to create a file system on this. # mke2fs -j /dev/sdb1 mke2fs 1.39 (29-May-2006) /dev/sdb1 is apparently in use by the system; will not make a filesystem here! ??? Neither fuser, nor lsof, nor searches for anything else reveal why /dev/sdb1 could be "in use". OK, lets try to force the issue # mke2fs -F -j /dev/sdb1 mke2fs 1.39 (29-May-2006) /dev/sdb1 is apparently in use by the system; mke2fs forced anyway. /dev/sdb1: Device or resource busy while setting up superblock If I will try "strace" the above then I can only see: stat("/dev/sdb1", {st_mode=S_IFBLK|0640, st_rdev=makedev(8, 17), ...}) = 0 open("/dev/sdb1", O_RDONLY|O_EXCL) = -1 EBUSY (Device or resource busy) and I am not much wiser. It does not appear that anythying on initrd or udev is really holding to /dev/sdb or /dev/sdb1, or at least not in some obvious manner. Actually I started trying to add that disk to LVM, and with no partitioning at all, but 'pvcreate' also refuses to do anythning because this disk is "busy" (while 'fdisk' was happy to oblidge). If instead of rawhide I will boot some older distro on the same hardware then 'mke2fs' does not have problems with the same partition. Any ideas what is going on here? Makes adding a disk space to an installation somewhat "interesting". Oh, this disk shows as /dev/sdb as this is a SATA device. Michal