Howto make partition changes visible to the kernel without reboot

Many system administrators may be in the habit of re-booting their systems to make partition changes visible to the kernel. With Linux, this is not usually necessary. The partprobe command, from the parted package, informs the kernel about changes to partitions.

The GNU Parted disk partition resizing program.GNU Parted is a program that allows you to create, destroy, resize, move and copy hard disk partitions. This is useful for creating space for new operating systems, reorganising disk usage, and copying data to new hard disks. This package contains the Parted binary and manual page.

Parted currently supports DOS, Mac, Sun, BSD, GPT, MIPS and PC98 disklabels/partition tables, as well as a ‘loop’ (raw disk) type which allows use on RAID/LVM. Filesystems which are currently fully supported are ext2, ext3, fat (FAT16 and FAT32), ReiserFS (with libreiserfs) and linux-swap. Parted can also detect and remove HFS (Mac OS), JFS, NTFS, UFS (Sun and HP), XFS and ASFS/AFFS/APFS (Amiga) filesystems, but cannot create, resize or check these filesystems yet.

Note that ReiserFS support is only enabled if you install the libreiserfs0.3-0 package. Since libreiserfs0.3-0 has been removed from sarge, ReiserFS support is not compiled in the default package.

The nature of this software means that any bugs could cause massive data loss. While there are no known bugs at the moment, they could exist, so please back up all important files before running it, and do so at your own risk.

Now we need to install parted because partprobe is a part of parted package

Install parted in debian

#apt-get install parted

Now this will install partprobe and parted.Partprobe inform the OS of partition table changes. 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.

Syntax

partprobe [-d] [-s] [devices…]

-d DonĂ¢t update the kernel.
-s Show a summary of devices and their partitions.
-h Show summary of options.
-v Show version of program.

Using partprobe

#partprobe

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6 thoughts on “Howto make partition changes visible to the kernel without reboot

  1. please stick to the post topic while posting, your post talks a lot about parted but only talks about partprobe in the last closing lines.

  2. partprobe works 95 /100 times but still there is a 5% chances that your system might not be able to work even after partprobe, so still partprobe is considered a quci cut and not the actuall solution.

    partprobe actually just updates the kernel table entries so as to make changes visible.

  3. @admin
    yes i know we need to install parted for partprobe but you should have dealt with what partprobe actually do so that you don’t need to restart system. instead of showing options about how to use parted.

    coz most of the people use fdisk + partprobe combination coz thwey find parted cumbersome. although i agree it has a lot more features then fdisk but full potential is realized only by QTPARTED or GPARTED

    BYTHE WAY i THINK you have changed the aticle, so the thing is done.

  4. I keep getting “Device or resource busy”, although, I am repartitioning a disk that is not mounted and I am doing it from a Live CD. What’s up with that?

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