{"id":629,"date":"2008-03-10T09:25:30","date_gmt":"2008-03-10T14:25:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.law.harvard.edu\/hoanga\/2008\/03\/10\/rereading-a-disk-partition-table-in-li"},"modified":"2008-03-10T09:25:30","modified_gmt":"2008-03-10T14:25:30","slug":"rereading-a-disk-partition-table-in-linux-without-rebooting","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/hoanga\/2008\/03\/10\/rereading-a-disk-partition-table-in-linux-without-rebooting\/","title":{"rendered":"Rereading a disk partition table in Linux without rebooting"},"content":{"rendered":"

Ran into a problem with trying to partition up a disk on a running system. The idea is I wanted to create a new partition on a disk with partitions already mounted and use it without rebooting.<\/p>\n

Here’s what you’ll mostly likely run into…<\/p>\n

\r\n# sudo fdisk \/dev\/sda\r\n... Steps for adding disk  elided ...\r\n\r\nCommand (m for help): w\r\nThe partition table has been altered!\r\n\r\nCalling ioctl() to re-read partition table.\r\n\r\nWARNING: Re-reading the partition table failed with error 16: Device or resource busy.\r\nThe kernel still uses the old table.\r\nThe new table will be used at the next reboot.\r\nSyncing disks.\r\n\r\nahoang@jp-db-3:~$ sudo mke2fs -m 0 -j \/dev\/sda3\r\nmke2fs 1.40.2 (12-Jul-2007)\r\nCould not stat \/dev\/sda3 --- No such file or directory\r\n\r\nThe device apparently does not exist; did you specify it correctly?\r\n\r\n# ls -la \/dev\/sda*\r\n\/dev\/sda   \/dev\/sda1  \/dev\/sda2  \r\n<\/pre>\n
The simplest thing to do is just reboot and Linux will redetect everything on restart.  However, sometimes you just can’t reboot.  After Googling around it seems that partprobe does the job handily<\/a>.  Luckily this tool is already on an Ubuntu system so no need to apt-get install but it’s only a few keystrokes away.<\/p>\n
Here’s the rest of the log once I ran partprobe and was humming along…<\/p>\n
\r\n# sudo partprobe\r\n# ls \/dev\/sda*\r\n\/dev\/sda  \/dev\/sda1  \/dev\/sda2  \/dev\/sda3\r\n# sudo mke2fs -m 0 -j \/dev\/sda3\r\nmke2fs 1.40.2 (12-Jul-2007)\r\n... Creating a file system output elided ...\r\n<\/pre>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Ran into a problem with trying to partition up a disk on a running system. The idea is I wanted to create a new partition on a disk with partitions already mounted and use it without rebooting. Here’s what you’ll mostly likely run into… # sudo fdisk \/dev\/sda … Steps for adding disk elided … […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":703,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1216,1100],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-629","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-fixes","category-linux"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/hoanga\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/629","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/hoanga\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/hoanga\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/hoanga\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/703"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/hoanga\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=629"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/hoanga\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/629\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/hoanga\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=629"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/hoanga\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=629"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/hoanga\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=629"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}