I have a server with hot swap disks. I'd like to be able to swap out a non-system disk , eg /dev/sdd and put in a new disk, partition it in fdisk, then mount those partitions. This all works fine, I can partition it, but the linux kernel hangs on to the old disk partitions in memory, so I can't mke2fs or mount the newly created partitions, without doing a reboot.
Is there a way to force the kernel re-read the partition tables on a non-system disk? How do people maintain high uptime, if you need to reboot every time just to see an extra disk in a hot swap system? Paul