Hi, Mick, On Sun, Jul 20, 2008 at 06:22:23PM +0100, Mick wrote: > On Sunday 20 July 2008, Alan Mackenzie wrote:
> > So the kernel guys have decided that nobody would ever want more than 15 > > partitions on a drive. > From memory I recall that this has always been the limit for SATA/SCSI > drives. For ATA drives I think it is 63? If I do # ls -l /dev/hd[gh], I get: brw-rw---- 1 root disk 34, 0 2005-02-26 06:43 /dev/hdg brw-rw---- 1 root disk 34, 64 2005-02-26 06:43 /dev/hdh , which does indeed suggest a max of 63. However, there's nothing on the disk partition structure (which is basically a chain of extended partitions across the entire disk) to limit this. > Not sure if this is a Linux OS kernel restriction - what is the maximum > number > that MSWindows see? What's MSWindows? ;-) Proabably a lot less than 63. However, the limit of 15 (which I didn't know about before) is a good reason for me not to migrate to SATA disks. I _like_ having lots of partitions ~1 - 4 Gb. It was trivial for me to clear a 4 Gb partition for a trial installation of Gentoo (which, by the way, I'm expecting to expand into my prime system - my Debian Sarge is beginning to feel very tired). Shoe horning IDE disks into the S{ATA,CSI}'s 15 partition limit seems an unkind thing to do. > Mick -- Alan Mackenzie (Nuremberg, Germany).