If partprobe does not find a partition table, it refuses to act but does not report an error

[Tristan Schmelcher]

I ran shred on a hard drive (/dev/sdd) and then tried to run partprobe to make the device node for its sole partition disappear (/dev/sdd1). It was not mounted at the time. partprobe claimed to succeed, but in fact it did nothing. Running "blockdev --rereadpt /dev/sdd" worked.

$ sudo partprobe
$ ls /dev/sdd*
/dev/sdd /dev/sdd1
$ sudo partprobe /dev/sdd
$ ls /dev/sdd*
/dev/sdd /dev/sdd1
$ sudo blockdev --rereadpt /dev/sdd
$ ls /dev/sdd*
/dev/sdd
$

ProblemType: Bug
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 12.10
Package: parted 2.3-10ubuntu2
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 3.5.0-21.32-generic 3.5.7.1
Uname: Linux 3.5.0-21-generic x86_64
NonfreeKernelModules: nvidia
ApportVersion: 2.6.1-0ubuntu9
Architecture: amd64
Date: Thu Jan 24 22:08:03 2013
MarkForUpload: True
ProcEnviron:
 TERM=xterm
 PATH=(custom, no user)
 XDG_RUNTIME_DIR=<set>
 LANG=en_US.UTF-8
 SHELL=/bin/bash
SourcePackage: parted
UpgradeStatus: Upgraded to quantal on 2012-10-28 (88 days ago)

[Phillip Susi (psusi)]

I am unable to reproduce this. How did you remove the partition from the drive in the first place, and what partition table is it using?

[Tristan Schmelcher (tschmelcher)]

I securely erased the drive's entire data with shred. i.e.:

sudo shred /dev/sdd

So after this there was no longer a partition table at all. (Prior to this, it was a DOS partition table.)

[Phillip Susi (psusi)]

Ahh, then this is intentional. partprobe refuses to act if it can not recognize any partition table. Either remove the partition before shreding, or add a new but empty partition table after, or use the lower level delpart command.

[Tristan Schmelcher (tschmelcher)]

Gotcha. Refusing to act makes sense. However, exiting without any error seems like a valid bug to me.

[Phillip Susi (psusi)]

It appears I inadvertently fixed this in trusty; partprobe now returns an error if it finds no table.