Hey,


I got rid of a winders partition on my SATA drive /dev/sda. I created two partitions in its place. Previous layout of drive:

/dev/sda1 type linux
/dev/sda2 type ntfs

Current
/dev/sda1 linux
/dev/sda2 linux
/dev/sda3 swap

So now this drive has a third partition. Now the only problem is that I cannot figure out how to create a /dev/sda3 entry so I can create that swap and begin using it WITHOUT rebooting, hehe. I have tried manually creating the device file with mknod with the proper major minor and all that good stuff. But I still get this from the command

#mkswap /dev/sda3
no such device or address: /dev/sda3

What can I do to get udev or hotplug to notice this change in the disc partitioning, short of just rebooting the machine or changing runlevel? I have read some man pages for udev and I couldn't really find what I was looking for.

More info:
Slack 10.2
Kernel 2.6.13.2

I have tried restarting the /etc/rc.d/rc.hotplug and rc.udev scripts.
I don't remember having to reboot in the past after changing non root partitions in linux. And I would hate to have to reboot this machine just b/c of this. I thought I was past the DOS fdisk have to reboot days. If I can't accomplish this without rebooting, for this instance, I would like to know if there is something I could change in udev.conf that would allow it in the future.


Thanks

Joe-

If you are using udev (and you seem to be) it should be automatically created. If it's not, you can try running:
This forces the kernel to re-read the partition table on the device. See the sfdisk man page for details.

Apparently it can't be done. I get a Device or resource busy(i tried the --noreread and --force options). /dev/sda1 is mounted as / but no changes were made to this partition. I have done some more reading and some googling found a few interesting things like partx and such. I just don't understand why this isn't available in 2.6. Seems we might be behind winders here. I've known how to do the very same thing since Win2k without rebooting.

If you have anymore suggestions let me know.

Thanks for help!


Joe-

I've repartitioned several drives without rebooting, though admittedly not the drive containing my root partition. I'm not sure where the problem is coming from.

Well i would post a link to a thread on sambadotorg but I can't until I have 5 post, lol. Anyways, a guy wanted to do the same thing, add swap without rebooting. It seems that you cannot change the partition table in the kernel memory unless that device is not mounted or there is no swap in use.

Rant... I see this a limitation that I had thought all modern OS's no longer ran into. Wish I knew how to contribute some work around. I definitely do not see a need for LVM for this machine and a few others to avoid this in the future.

Here comes the reboot.

Thanks for your help Matir


Joe-


Here is a link to that thread with dots and http removed so i could post it.

listsDOTsambaDOTorg/archive/linux/2005-April/013334DOThtml

I take all that back! I just found out that parted will update the kernel's partition tables. You can find parted at gnu.org. partprobe is what you want to run after installing the parted pkg/source.

a cat of /proc/partitions now shows /dev/sda3 for me.


Joe- 8-)