for some time now, i've gotten used to having to reboot after creating a new partition since (at least in some cases) the kernel is no longer in sync with the actual partition table on the hard drive. from memory, someone once mentioned that this is only necessary for logical(?) partitions, but i never really tried to remember the specific conditions -- i just assumed, new partition ==> reboot. however, recently, as i was reading the LVM howto, i noticed the recipe for formatting a physical volume using "pvcreate" if you need to get rid of the partition table: # dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/diskname bs=1k count=1 #fair enough # blockdev --rereadpt /dev/diskname # hey, what's this? now *that's* interesting, i thought -- i'd never heard of the "blockdev" command, and the argument of "--rereadpt" sure looks promising. as i don't have a machine around that i can arbitrarily create a new partition on at the moment, can anyone discuss the logistics of this command, and whether it would really force a reread of the disk partition table to prevent a reboot? rday
