USB stick formatting problem

Ask Fedora
1

I have installed Fedora for a few months now and today I wanted to do the same on another PC but with a different distro so I inserted the USB stick and tried to format. The error I find is “Error unmounting /dev/sda1: target is busy (udisks-error-quark, 14)”. This is what I find by running the lsblk command:

lsblk
NAME        MAJ:MIN RM   SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINTS
loop0         7:0    0    20K  1 loop /var/lib/snapd/snap/hello-world/29
loop1         7:1    0  55,4M  1 loop /var/lib/snapd/snap/core18/2855
loop2         7:2    0 104,2M  1 loop /var/lib/snapd/snap/core/17200
loop3         7:3    0  50,9M  1 loop /var/lib/snapd/snap/snapd/24505
sda           8:0    1   3,7G  0 disk 
├─sda1        8:1    1   2,3G  0 part /run/media/dbove/Fedora-WS-Live-41-1-4
├─sda2        8:2    1  12,6M  0 part 
└─sda3        8:3    1   300K  0 part 
zram0       251:0    0     8G  0 disk [SWAP]
nvme0n1     259:0    0 476,9G  0 disk 
├─nvme0n1p1 259:1    0   600M  0 part /boot/efi
├─nvme0n1p2 259:2    0     1G  0 part /boot
└─nvme0n1p3 259:3    0 475,4G  0 part /home
                                      /

My question is: can I format the stick considering that my Fedora is already installed and in use correctly without a stick? And then, can I create some damage to my installation?

2

You can unmount it with the command umount /dev/sda1. You can also do this from Gnome Disks. Search for “disk” to start it. The unmount button is a small black square under the thing you want to unmount. Gnome disks can also recrate a new partiton table, create a new partition in that table and create a file system in that partition.

3

The Live USB Installer may be needed to resolve issues when the installed system fails to boot. If you don’t have access to another system you can use to create a new USB installer, you may regret formatting the one you have now.

4

Gparted is my goto tool for disk management. It is a built in option if using a SystemRescue USB and can be temporarily installed on a Fedora Live CD via ‘sudo dnf install -y gparted’.

5

To answer Giorgio N. Bianco III, I have access to other devices that I can use to create another Live USB. But if I took what I have on the USB stick to install Fedora and created a folder in the Cloud can I get those files back on a stick and do the installation?

Citazione[quote=“Villy Kruse, post:2, topic:153031, full:true, username:vekruse”]
You can unmount it with the command umount /dev/sda1. You can also do this from Gnome Disks. Search for “disk” to start it. The unmount button is a small black square under the thing you want to unmount. Gnome disks can also recrate a new partiton table, create a new partition in that table and create a file system in that partition.
[/quote]

When you say create a file system on the partition do you mean create the file system on the hard drive of the PC itself? If so, could you briefly explain the steps?

6

This post may be of interest to you.

Install Fedora 41 as a Portable Workstation

7

The disk units is divided up into one or more partitions. That can be managed by fdisk, but can also be manged by gparted or Gnome Disks. In each partition you can create a file system, for example btrfs or ext4 file system. You can use that using the mkfs command, but can also be done by the GUI tools. Only on floppy disk did you create file systems without the partition table in between.