On Wed, 2006-11-01 at 09:00 -0500, Tom Horsley wrote: > 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). I believe the limit on IDE is 63 (again just an artifact of the Linux Driver - not the hard drive itself).... > > 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 :-). > I believe that IDE disks will be managed by the SCSI driver also in the future so the 15 limit will rear up on those folks soon and may be why fdisk shipped with that limit in anticipation of the "change"..... > 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 :-). Yes, LVM. Or, as another thread suggested, just make one big 'ol "/" and a swap and forget this divvying up of the hard drive.... <evil grin> > > I think that's it. Any details wrong here? (Thanks to all the folks who > replied and helped make this summary possible). >
