HotSwapping Disks

I have a server with hot swap disks.
I'd like to be able to swap out a non-system disk , eg /dev/sdd and put in
a new
disk, partition it in fdisk, then mount those partitions. This all works
fine, I can partition it,
but the linux kernel hangs on to the old disk partitions in memory, so I
can't mke2fs or
mount the newly created partitions, without doing a reboot.

Is there a way to force the kernel re-read the partition tables on a
non-system disk?
How do people maintain high uptime, if you need to reboot every time just to
see an extra
disk in a hot swap system?

Paul

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