From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: Jon Fullmer Subject: Re: Partitioning on i386 Date: Fri, 08 Aug 2003 06:39:05 -0600 Sender: linux-admin-owner@vger.kernel.org Message-ID: References: <3732.66.183.196.224.1060332817.squirrel@dctchambers.com> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Return-path: In-Reply-To: <3732.66.183.196.224.1060332817.squirrel@dctchambers.com> List-Id: Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" To: Scott Taylor , linux-admin@vger.kernel.org First, I was mistaken. It's actually a maximum of 15 partitions for a SCSI drive and a maximum of 63 partitions for IDE. I apologize for not verifying my response. I had run into this issue before, and I remembered that IDE drives allowed for a lot more partitions, but I couldn't remember the maximum (I knew that the SCSI limit was correct). Next, RTFM? Good advice! Here's an excerpt from the Partition HowTO (http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/Partition/partition-3.html): "The primary partition used to house the logical partitions is called an extended partition and it has its own file system type (0x05). Unlike primary partitions, logical partitions must be contiguous. Each logical partition contains a pointer to the next logical partition, which implies that the number of logical partitions is unlimited. However, linux imposes limits on the total number of any type of prtition on a drive, so this effectively limits the number of logical partitions. This is at most 15 partitions total on an SCSI disk and 63 total on an IDE disk." I ran into this issue over a year ago when I tried to create more than 15 partitions on a SCSI drive and kept getting mysterious failures. From my research back then, it seemed that I also discovered this limitation to be unique to the Intel platform (which makes sense, as other platforms aren't bound to the primary/extended partition set up), but I've never proven that one way or the other yet. That, and the HowTO entry I quoted would seem to designate this limitation as unique to Linux, not the platform. Anyway, I hope that helps. As I've mentioned, I've hit the 15-partition SCSI ceiling before, but I would think you'd be pretty safe with IDE. It's hard to imagine setting up more than 63 partitions on a single drive. But then, with 256 GB drives.... - Jon on 8/8/03 2:53 AM, Scott Taylor at scott@dctchambers.com wrote: > Jon Fullmer said: > >> I believe you are correct, Andrew, when dealing with SCSI drives. But >> (if >> I'm not mistaken) with IDE drives, the maximum is 40 total partitions >> (3 >> primary 1 extended 37 logical). > > man fdisk > > RTFM > > It has nothing to do with SCSI or IDE, only primary partitions are > limited. Most Linux installs allow for 37 partitions by making nodes > /dev/hd?0 - /dev/hd?36. Doesn't mean you can't create more. > > > > > -- > Scott > long .signature files are annoying > - > To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-admin" in > the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org > More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html >