Red Hat Knowledgebase

You may be able to use a utility called partprobe, which is part of the parted RPM package. The partprobe utility was added to the parted-1.6 and is available on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3. Partprobe is a program that informs the operating system kernel of partition table changes, by requesting that the operating system re-read the partition table. To see if partprobe is installed on your system, you can run the command:

rpm -q parted

For example:

# rpm -q parted parted-1.6.3-29

You can install the parted RPM with up2date parted if your system is registered with Red Hat Network (RHN). Otherwise, you can install this package from your installation CDs.

To use partprobe, you would typically use a utility like fdisk to create new partitions. Then you can run the partprobe command to re-read the newly created partition table as the root user.

For example:

# partprobe

This will not return any output upon completion. After executing the command, you should be able to create filesystem on your newly created or modified partitions with the mke2fs command.

Please see additional articles in the knowledgebase on how to use fdisk, create filesystems, and install RPMs.