what partitioning rule am I not aware of?

Tom Horsley tomhorsley at adelphia.net
Wed Nov 1 14:00:09 UTC 2006


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).




More information about the fedora-list mailing list