Disk partitioning commands for RHEL5

I'm new to Linux 5, going through initial phases of installation and setting up devices, etc,, and much to my surprise discovered also an existence of a 2nd hard drive to try to initialize and partition perhaps using any built-in command i.e. "fdisk" or similar, but I couldn't get the command to work. I'm currently using bash shell. What could I be missing, other than a brain? Any help or suggestion would be much appreciated. Thank you.

fdisk
lvmdiskscan
pvcreate
vgcreate
lvcreate
mkfs
vgextend
lvextend
resize2fs
pvs
pvdisplay
vgdisplay
lvdisplay
df
mount

# When adding a new disk...
for S in $(ls /sys/class/scsi_host); do
  echo "- - -" > /sys/class/scsi_host/$S/scan
done

Also, as a point of note, You are using Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 (with a minor version that you omitted). Linux is too general, so as to not confuse you, or others, or start a flame fest about which distribution is better, you may want to be more specific (Besides just posting in the Red Hat section).

Truth be told, Linux is on 2.6. That is the version of the kernel, which is, by all rights, what "Linux" is.

For most physical drives, I like to run the following command:

lvmdiskscan | grep -v ram

However, if the drives have not been detected for some reason (you may want to restart udevd) you could run the command at the end of Scott's informative list:

...and although highly recommended, it's not necessary to configure an LVM though... you can just fdisk the drive with a standard Linux native format (usually 0x83) and create the filesystem with mkfs or something similar.

Thank you all for your helpful insights. i hope to relearn new scripting skills and be of help as you have all been for me and to this posting. The kernel version of EL5 I use is 2.6 as well which came bundled for their newer Oracle 11g R2 all free downloads from their home site. The gist of my bewilderment came from the failed execution of the 'fdisk' command. I checked for the full pathname to make sure the command exists, but then I should have made sure the path is appended in $PATH, which in my case it didn't, and fixing it there made it work. If it didn't, I would have just as well reinstall the command file assuming corruption as culprit. I'll have more days like this. Thanks again - and stay healthy!