HJ and All:
Thanks. On Thu, 3 Oct 2002, HJ Hornbeck wrote: > I was thinking the sheer number of partitions was screwing up Linux, > so I went digging for the answer to this. Here's what the LDP's > partition mini-HOWTO says: > > 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. ( > http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/mini/Partition/partition-3.html ) Good show! Let's see now, 40 Gb divided into 63 partitions gives about 634 Mb per partition... JUST KIDDING! JUST KIDDING! > You do mention that you're having difficulty accessing the last 5 > partitions on the drive, and if I'm reading correctly you have 20 > partitions on that drive. It sounds like you're bumping against SCSI's > limits on an IDE drive. Do you see any mention of SCSI in your boot > options, or dmesg output? Have you tried compiling your own kernel? > Linux can do SCSI emulation for IDE drives, which might be causing this. > I doubt it would be present in the install kernel, but the post-install > one could very well have it enabled. It turns out that I do have a SCSI card in the box that Linux recognizes. Your suggestion, however, doesn't seem very likely. I will keep it in mind of nothing else presents itself. Apparently Linux couldn't install or boot properly when it was on the higher end of the drive because it couldn't effectively read the data off the higher partitions. When I moved it "south" it magically booted, although in a brain damaged fashion. But it still can't find the last 5 partitions. In addition, I get a lot of errors on boot-up about "Special Device /dev/hda17 does not exist." But they do exist. Window$ sees them, Linux' fdisk saw them, Linux' Disk Druid saw them and labeled them just fine. So, I got to thinking, maybe the "/dev/" part was the problem. I checked the file listing for /dev/hda* and found that there are no devices defined higher than hda16! I'll bet that's the problem. The Linux gurus, like Bill Gates (640 K ought to be ...), simply assumed no one would ever want or need more partitions. The obvious solution is to find out how Linux creates more devices. Apparently the utility of choice is MAKEDEV. Now all I have to do is determine whether or not it's resident on my machine, then determine how to use is. Stay tuned... Peace, health, wisdom and wealth. Live long and prosper. Stan Schultz Techno-Geek wannabe Home: (403) 230-1911 Work: (403) 220-8570 FAX: (403) 270-8928 Webpage: http://www.ucalgary.ca/~schultz
