I think this thread needs a summary of what was going on: 1. The disks themselves can support lots of partitions in an extended partition (and Windows can access those partitions just fine). 2. Linux treats SATA drives as scsi devices, and honest to gosh scsi disks only allowed 15 partitions (historically, anyway, maybe true even today). 3. Because of #2, the major/minor device numbering for /dev/sd* in Linux only supports 15 minor device numbers. <<==<< This is the rule I wasn't aware of :-). 4. The Linux IDE drivers work differently, so no such limit exists for /dev/hd* devices in Linux (lots more partitions are possible). 5. Because making more than 15 partitions causes so much confusion, a crippled fdisk was deliberately shipped at one point that refuses to talk about partitions > 15 on scsi disks (which is not very helpful when you are trying to deal with a disk from a Windows system that already has more than 15 partitions you'd like to delete - I hate "helpful" software :-). 6. If I really want lots of partitions, I can delve into LVM-land and make them that way (after getting my brain trained to think LVM :-). I think that's it. Any details wrong here? (Thanks to all the folks who replied and helped make this summary possible).
