Re: updating the partition table of a busy drive

[Andreas Dilger]

On Aug 27, 2002  00:52 +0300, Yedidyah Bar-David wrote:
> Currently, any change to a partition table of a busy drive is
> practically delayed to the next reboot. Even things trivial as
> changing the type of an unmounted partition do not work, if
> another partition on that drive is mounted (or swapped to, etc.).
> 
> On a side note, about a year and a half ago, there was a thread
> on lkml with the subject 'Partition IDs in the New World TM', in
> which a 'parttab' file was mentioned. I grepped and STFWed a lot,
> and could not find any relevant mention anywhere, besides this
> thread. Is this parttab implemented? Documented? Perhaps under
> a different name? Is this case it is quite hard to find
> (google search for 'linux parttab' has 37 results, but for
> e.g. 'linux partition table initrd' 11400 results).

Please see partx (util-linux) and/or GNU parted for tools which can
change partitions on mounted disks.  I believe the kernel has supported
this since 2.4.0, but not many tools do.

Cheers, Andreas
--
Andreas Dilger
http://www-mddsp.enel.ucalgary.ca/People/adilger/
http://sourceforge.net/projects/ext2resize/