Adams Bros Blog

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