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On Sun, 15 Jun 2003 16:03:10 -0400 (EDT), Robert P. J. Day wrote:
>
> since the online docs are just plain confusing, i thought i'd ask here
> to clarify.
>
> in the RH 9 Customization Guide, Chapter 5, "Managing Disk Storage", the
> intro to parted claims that if you want to create or remove a partition,
> "the device can not be in use". this seems to suggest that the disk must
> be entirely inactive, but this is clearly not true, since i've used parted
> to create a new partition on my current (and only) drive on my system.
> is this claim wrong, or am i reading it incorrectly?
>
> also, until now, when i've used "fdisk" to add a new (logical)
> partition, i've always had to reboot after the fdisk before i could use
> "mkfs", since the reboot apparently allows the new partition table to be
> recognized by the kernel.
>
> i noticed recently that you don't have to reboot with parted, which
> suggests that parted somehow registers the new partition table with the
> kernel automatically. can anyone explain how parted does this when fdisk
> doesn't?
First of all, I can't explain it. I'd just like to point out that
parted also contains such a warning, and I've seen it frequently:
"The kernel was unable to re-read the partition table on %s
(%s). This means Linux won't know anything nothing about the
modifications you made until you reboot. You should reboot your
computer before doing anything with %s."
But also this which I don't remember having seen before:
"Error informing the kernel about modifications to partition %s
- %s. This means Linux won't know about any changes you made to
%s until you reboot - so you shouldn't mount it or use it in any
way before rebooting."
*Maybe* (oh, i shouldn't speculate, but use the source ;) it depends
on what changes are applied to the partition table. Perhaps adding a
new partition works, but deleting and changing partitions doesn't, or
something like that.
- --
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