New device drivers don't see beyond 15 partitions in fc7

[Rob Andrews]

On 21-Dec-2006 22:57.31 (GMT), Clyde E. Kunkel wrote:
 > With the change from traditional /dev/hd* type device nodes to /dev/sd* 
 > type nodes, I see that the highest partition number that can be used is 
 > 15.  Will this change so that higher numbers will be available?  I do 
 > have a system that has a drive with almost 30 small partitions used in a 
 > research effort and the number of partitions has not been an issue thru fc6.

devices.txt says that hdN device numbering supports up to 63 partitions per
disk. It also says that sdN device numbering follows the same trend as hdN
numbering (unified partition table handling, and all).

I didn't think that PC BIOS partition tables supported > 15 partitions. To
the best of my knowledge, the 63-partition numbering scheme was there for
partition table formats that *did* support it (Amiga RDB, BSD disk label,
etc).

To quote the fdisk(8) manual page:

    The partition is a device name followed by a partition number.
    For example, /dev/hda1 is the first partition on the first IDE
    hard disk in the system. Disks can have up to 15 partitions.
    See also /usr/src/linux/Documentation/devices.txt.

To reiterate what another writer has said, lvm is a smashing way of working.
And it has a much more flexible ("meaningful") volume naming scheme.

-- 
rob andrews                       :: pgp 0x01e00563 :: rob at choralone.org