In an excess of energy I decided to see how many different OSes I could install to compare their behavior with a weird X bug I encountered in FC6: https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=8790 I figured 20 gig was about enough for each root, and decided to create 7 small /boot partitions near the front of the disk (since so many boot loaders have problems with big addresses) and 7 20 gig partitions after that for different kernels (my disk is a 160 gig sata drive). Windows has no problems doing this, but fdisk -l won't print any info about partitions after /dev/sda15 and if I try to install FC5 on a system that actually has an sda16 and sda17 partition (even if I don't try to use them for anything), anaconda blows up at the partitioning stage when it is about to try to partition and install. If I go back to windows, delete the last two partitions, and re-install, all goes smoothly. Is there some rule I don't know about on the number of partitions? Or is it a rule about the starting address of a partition (can't be too big maybe)? Its really very irritating that they keep making disks bigger and bigger and software never seems to know what to do with them :-).
