CentOS - Oct 2009 - Rescan for new geometry without reboot?

Hello,

We just had our servers fitted with more disks. Most of the disks are
growing existing RAID 1+0 channels, some are in new channels.
Controllers and disks support live installation.

I'd like to avoid a reboot just to let the system find that the disks
are larger.

All I can find so far suggests that its possible to rescan the disks,
and even find the new geometry (e.g.
http://linux.derkeiler.com/Mailing-Lists/Kernel/2004-12/1555.html) but
nobody knows how to actually convince the system to let me use the
extra space without a reboot.

Does anyone know of a way to achieve this?

Thanks,

--Amos

Hello, 
 
I must say I've not still tryed, but with fdisk you can change number of
cilinders to set to new size (you must calculate it), and with partprobe (man
partprobe) you can reread online "partition table"; now, since kernel
gets disk geometry and partition table at boot time, and this command force it
to reread almost partition table, I believe (hope) that reread entre disk
geometry.
 
I will try in a couple of month, for now I've changed array size of many HP
Proliant but always with reboot.
 
I suggest you to search about partprobe command features.
 
Stefano
 
>We just had our servers fitted with more disks. Most of the disks are
>growing existing RAID 1+0 channels, some are in new channels.
>Controllers and disks support live installation.
>
>I'd like to avoid a reboot just to let the system find that the disks
>are larger.

 
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