What I was saying by "entire disk" meant the disk without using ANY partitions. (In this context by "disk" I mean each LUN presented from your Array.) What you show in fdisk -luc output is that you did create partitions so are not using the "entire disk". My previous point was if you're using LVM for the devices you don't need to put a partition on them as you can use the entire disk as a PV rather than having to use a single partition that has all the space.

You say you used fdisk to parition the sd device then used parted on the mpath. Both fdisk and parted are partitioning tools. I was saying I found issues partitioning the mpath device and on researching it when I ran into it the suggestion was to NOT partition the mpath device but instead partition the underlying sd device then use partprobe and the flush to make sure all related devices see the partitions created that way.

Your fdisk -luc shows a couple of disks where the partition type is "Microsoft basic primary". I'm wondering if those are the ones you're having an issue with. If you notice your other partitions are type "Linux filesyste" instead.

Hi MensaWater,

Sorry for the miss understanding. So from what you are saying then potentially it is the way that I created the partitions that could be the issue

No the Microsoft Partitions are from where I connected the iSCSI to a Windows Server and formatted the disks using Windows NTFS for some file storage. The others are VMFS5, I have the same issue with all of them

Just to be clear I wasn't saying you can't use partitions. You can. I was just saying it isn't necessary if your intent is to use the entire disk as an LVM PV in a single VG. Having a partition in and of itself isn't a problem but does complicate the setup a bit so I was saying you could do without the single partition.

IF you do use a partition (which again I'm saying shouldn't be necessary), the rest of what I was saying about was saying to create only using the /dev/sd* device and NOT the /dev/mapper/mpath* or /dev/dm-* devices. Using the partprobe and the flushbufs should make the partitions automatically populate for the /dev/mapper/mpath* and /dev/dm-* devices from what is discovered in the associated /dev/sd* device. You should not have to be creating any links yourself.