Hi, Mick,
On Sun, Jul 20, 2008 at 06:22:23PM +0100, Mick wrote:
> On Sunday 20 July 2008, Alan Mackenzie wrote:
> > So the kernel guys have decided that nobody would ever want more than 15
> > partitions on a drive.
> From memory I recall that this has always been the limit for SATA/SCSI
> drives. For ATA drives I think it is 63?
If I do # ls -l /dev/hd[gh], I get:
brw-rw---- 1 root disk 34, 0 2005-02-26 06:43 /dev/hdg
brw-rw---- 1 root disk 34, 64 2005-02-26 06:43 /dev/hdh
, which does indeed suggest a max of 63. However, there's nothing on the
disk partition structure (which is basically a chain of extended
partitions across the entire disk) to limit this.
> Not sure if this is a Linux OS kernel restriction - what is the maximum
> number
> that MSWindows see?
What's MSWindows? ;-)
Proabably a lot less than 63.
However, the limit of 15 (which I didn't know about before) is a good
reason for me not to migrate to SATA disks. I _like_ having lots of
partitions ~1 - 4 Gb. It was trivial for me to clear a 4 Gb partition
for a trial installation of Gentoo (which, by the way, I'm expecting to
expand into my prime system - my Debian Sarge is beginning to feel very
tired).
Shoe horning IDE disks into the S{ATA,CSI}'s 15 partition limit seems an
unkind thing to do.
> Mick
--
Alan Mackenzie (Nuremberg, Germany).
