I am trying to use qtparted to delete and format a partition for installation. However, it always shows the device as busy and won't actually do anything with it.

The partition is the second half of a 40GB drive, which is the second drive in the system. It is reported as hdb2 with hdb5 uder it. I have tried to delete both of these entities, but with no luck.

How can I release this partition for deleting? umount doesn't seem to work since it is not mounted. The partition itself was left unformatted. Do I have to umount the whole drive?

I hesitate to try fdisk since I am not comfortable with using it.

Any ideas?

Thanks.