I have an Ubuntu 14.04 machine which is used for imaging and wiping hard drives, mostly connected through USB 3.0 docks. I encounter a problem where after a certain number of hard drives are inserted and removed, it will no longer detect new hard drives. Unplugging and re-plugging the docks does not fix the issue, but a restart of the machine does. I think this is because some of the hard drives are faulty, so maybe writes are getting stuck in a queue which never finished because the drives are removed.
What is a way to safely tell Ubuntu to re-scan for drives and reset these queues without causing problems with existing mounted volumes?
The answer is the partprobe command. Running
sudo partprobetells the kernel to re-scan all available disks for partitions.sudo partprobe /dev/devicewill force a re-scan of a particular disk if that disk isn't showing partitions correctly.