Missing device file
In our ESX environment, I extended a virtual disk from VirtualCenter and created a new partition on it using fdisk. The new partition was to be added to a Volume Group under LVM. But the OS (RHEL5 in this case) didn’t recognize the partition. “pvcreate” said it could not find the the device it was “Ignored by filtering” – As it turned out it was not so much a question of filtering as the fact that the device file was missing; /dev/sdb2 simply did not exist. I did a lot of searching and jumping through hoops for a solution that did not include a reboot (the server in question is a production server) – While there might very well be other solutions to this – the one I found turned out to be quite simple: Don’t use fdisk – use “parted” instead:
parted DEVICE (parted) mkpart PART-TYPE START END (parted) toggle PART-NUMBER FLAG
in my case it looked like this:
parted /dev/sdb (parted) mkpart primary 53.7GB 107GB (parted) toggle 2 lvm (parted) print
Model: VMware Virtual disk (scsi) Disk /dev/sdb: 107GB Sector size (logical/physical): 512B/512B Partition Table: msdos
Number Start End Size Type File system Flags 1 32.3kB 53.7GB 53.7GB primary lvm 2 53.7GB 107GB 53.7GB primary lvm
And Voila! – you’ll have a new partition AND the corresponding device file!