On Thu, 28 Mar 2002, Matthew Dalton wrote:
> Actually, I'd thought for a while that the limitation for both was the
> same... can't remember where I picked that up from :/
>
> Anyway, it at least prompted me to find out the real limitations...
>
> Depending on which web page you read, the limits are something like 23
> for DOS/Windows (it's an alphabet thing, ie 26 - 3), 63 for IDE drives
> under Linux and 15 for SCSI drives under Linux.
>
> Well now I've just stumbled on a RedHat support page that says the limit
> is 16.
>
> Does anyone know what the *real* limits are?
Well....
dd if=/dev/zero of=bogusdisk bs=16384 count=100
fdisk bogusdisk
x [extended menu]
c [change cylinders]
100
h [change heads]
16
s [change sectors]
63
r [return to normal menu]
n [new partition]
p [primary]
1 [cyl 1]
2 [to cyl 2]
n [new partition]
e [extended]
3 [cyl 3]
100 [to cyl 100]
n [new partition]
l [logical]
{from here I did 2 cylinder wide partitions}
Command (m for help): p
Disk bogusdisk: 16 heads, 63 sectors, 100 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 1008 * 512 bytes
Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
bogusdisk1 1 2 976+ 83 Linux
bogusdisk2 3 100 49392 5 Extended
bogusdisk5 3 4 976+ 83 Linux
bogusdisk6 5 6 976+ 83 Linux
bogusdisk7 7 8 976+ 83 Linux
bogusdisk8 9 10 976+ 83 Linux
bogusdisk9 11 12 976+ 83 Linux
bogusdisk10 13 14 976+ 83 Linux
bogusdisk11 15 16 976+ 83 Linux
bogusdisk12 17 18 976+ 83 Linux
bogusdisk13 19 20 976+ 83 Linux
bogusdisk14 21 22 976+ 83 Linux
bogusdisk15 23 24 976+ 83 Linux
bogusdisk16 25 26 976+ 83 Linux
Command (m for help): n
The maximum number of partitions has been created
Command (m for help):
So I reckon fdisk's limit is 16.
Hey and guess what, although I have to tell it the geometry every time it
does retain the partition table in the bogus file I just created :-) Gotta
love unix, everything's a file even a bloody raw disk drive.
I dunno how I could format a partition within the file though <grin>.
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