I was having trouble today getting Linux to see my new partition space that I added in vSphere without rebooting the host. The new disk space was made visible by re-scanning the SCSI bus (below) and then the new partition was made visible by using the partprobe command (below).
I asked VMWare to provision my disk to be larger and then asked Linux to refresh the kernel info:
$ echo 1 > /sys/class/scsi_device/0\:0\:3\:0/device/rescan $ dmesg sdd: Write Protect is off sdd: Mode Sense: 61 00 00 00 sdd: cache data unavailable sdd: assuming drive cache: write through sdd: detected capacity change from 171798691840 to 343597383680
I added another partition and then tried to get LVM to use it:
$ fdisk /dev/sdd Command (m for help): n Command action e extended p primary partition (1-4) p Partition number (1-4): 3
But LVM couldn’t see it:
$ pvcreate /dev/sdd3 Device /dev/sdd3 not found (or ignored by filtering). $ pvcreate -vvvv /dev/sdd3 #device/dev-cache.c:578 /dev/sdd3: stat failed: No such file or directory #metadata/metadata.c:3546 #device/dev-cache.c:578 /dev/sdd3: stat failed: No such file or directory
The solution was to use partprobe to inform the OS of partition table changes:
$ partprobe /dev/sdd $ pvcreate /dev/sdd3 dev_is_mpath: failed to get device for 8:51 Writing physical volume data to disk "/dev/sdd3" Physical volume "/dev/sdd3" successfully created