udev and partitioning

[- Xian <mchugh19@yahoo.com>]

Hi all,

I just setup a machine with an ide disk for / and two sata disks I intend to mirror for storage. There were two partitions on the sata disks I wiped out to turn into one big linux raid autodetect partition. With /dev/sda, the processes worked just fine. I cfdisk'ed the drive and it's device node showed /dev/sda and /dev/sda1. The second disk I partitioned and udev never updated and continued to show /dev/sdb, /dev/sdb1, and /dev/sdb2. 

I tried echo'ing "- - -" into the proc scsci scan file to try to get the change to kick. dmesg showed that the kernel saw sdb correctly, but udev never updated. I even ran udevmonitor and did the echo rescan thing, but udev never even got the hotplug notification.

I've since rebooted the box and all was well, so I built my mirror. But I'm a bit nervous that I had to reboot. If I loose a drive, will I have to reboot to get hotplug to work then too? Should I have had to rebooted to get the partition table rescanned? Is there a way to force udev to start over and rescan everything? Is there a reason why the kernel saw /dev/sdb1, but udev did not manage the nodes properly?

Thanks,
Christian