Partitioning SAN Disks (multipath) requires a Reboot for New Partition to be Recognised?

[Alzhy]

We run RHEL 5.4.
We've been told to STOP the practice of not using unpartitioned whole disks.
So we started carving up the disks into 1 parition (p1) that encompass the whole disk.

Issue is -- after writing the parition table, the p1 parition is not available until after a reboot is done. Is this "normal" or is my set up having issues? This is the behaviour accros all my ecosystems. We are using HP's latest Device Multipather. Beow is an example of the dialogue:

Partition number (1-4):
Value out of range.
Partition number (1-4): 1
First cylinder (1-6799, default 1):
Using default value 1
Last cylinder or +size or +sizeM or +sizeK (1-6799, default 6799):
Using default value 6799

Command (m for help): w
The partition table has been altered!

Calling ioctl() to re-read partition table.

WARNING: Re-reading the partition table failed with error 22: Invalid argument.
The kernel still uses the old table.
The new table will be used at the next reboot.
Syncing disks.

I use fdisk. "partprobe" does not help too.

TIA.

[Steven E. Protter]

Shalom,

No way around that. It may be worth reporting to bugzilla.redhat.com but I see the exact same thing and have been forced to reboot when I did not feel it needed to be done.

SEP

[Alzhy]

Looks like the trick is to use kpartx.

[Michael Leu]

I'm curious, did RedHat tell you to stop using unpartitioned disks? With LVM I've never encountered any issues that would warrant such a requirement...