How to add new disks in RHEL without rebooting

[Binley Lim]

Disks can be added via the ACU and the server rebooted for those disks to be accessible and mounted in Redhat 5.

Is it possible to configure new disks (create logical drives) via ACU and then mount those disks in Redhat 5 without rebooting? If so, what are those commands?

I am familiar with fdisk/mkfs/mount. My question is how you can make/create the devices in the first place (without rebooting) so you can do the subsequent steps?

[Binley Lim]

Servers are DL380/DL580 G5/G6.

[Alexander Chuzhoy]

If the hardware supports hotswap - then you should check the output of dmesg for checking the device name.

After finishing with fdisk - run partprobe.

[KarloChacon]

as someone said before if your server support hot-plug it is like adding a USB key but adding hard drive in your case

you add you HDD, you open ACU create a RAID level, remember that won't create any type of filesystem so

after RAID is created you check your NEW Hard drives using
#fdisk -l
and you get something like this
Disk /dev/sd(*) doesn't contain a valid partition table

after that you just create a physical volume, volume groups, logical volumes, format partition as desired

I'm adding my guide for working with LVM

in my doc I added 2 Hard drives I did not created any RAID level, but it is the same procedure for RAID 0 o RAID 1, 5, ...

[Binley Lim]

The thing is I don't have any new device name corresponding to the new drive I just added. The only thing in messages is:

cmaeventd[3423]: Hot-plug drive inserted: Port 2I Box 1 Bay 4 of Array Controller in slot 1.

#fdisk -l only gives me a list of the previously mounted drives, ie it does not show me the newly inserted drive or complain about the newly inserted drive not containing a valid partition table. So in other words, the OS (Redhat 5) simply behaves as if the new drive does not exist.

I am familiar with what I have to do once I have a device name referring to the new drive. My question is how do you "make" the device name appear without rebooting.

PS: partprobe does not return anything.

[Markus Schibli]

Hi

Have a look at http://kbase.redhat.com/faq/docs/DOC-3942 "How do I rescan the SCSI bus to add or remove a SCSI device without rebooting the computer?"

cheers

[Steven E. Protter]

Shalom,

Possible. Hard to predict the outcome.

hp_rescan should pick up new disks created with acu, which only worked for me about half the time I tried it in Jerusalem with very modern hadware and infrastructure.

SEP