[LUNI] Partition question

[Martin Maney]

On Tue, Mar 05, 2002 at 05:42:49PM -0600, Javier Salazar wrote:
> Attached you will find a copy of the report created by "cfdisk".  It 

This has been an interesting little investigation, with many unexpected
learnings along the way.  I had never noticed that cfdisk's printed format
so badly mangles the partition data.  All those 1023s should be some other
numbers.  :-(

> shows I have 16 partitions.  After creating them, I still had 16M
> left.  I have in the mean started the install of RH7.0.  This new
> release allowed me to add one more partition.  However due to the 
> partition sizes, I still have 4M free.  I suppose, I could just 
> increase the size of one of the other patitions.

I was pretty certain that Linux allowed for more than /dev/hd*15, and I was
right, but there seems to be a bit of a catch.  I had up to hde13 in use,
and a bunch of unused space, so I created up through hde18.  I think I was
using cfdisk for that; in any event, it seemed to work, and both cfdisk and
fdisk reported the new partitions, no problem.

Couldn't mke2fs on any of them above hde15, though.

After some poking around, I couldn't find any explanation for it, so on a
hunch I rebooted.  The kernel reported finding all the new partitions, and
now I can mke2fs /dev/hde18, no problem.  I conclude, tenatively, that
there's a fixed-at-boot sized (max-sized?) table for partitions, perhaps
with a minimum (max?) size of 16, but if more partitions are found at boot
time the table will be sized to allow them, and maybe some more.

I'm not interested enough to pursue this further, since I seem to have found
an explanation for the unexpected limitation you first reported and the
behavior I observed, as well as an adequate work-around for it.  Not that I
would object if someone were to speak up with a fuller explanation or link
thereto.

With only 4M at stake I imagine this isn't worth much to you, but if you
really wanted to get two more partitions out of that formerly free space it
may help.

-- 
You arguably have quite a few inalienable rights,
but being taken seriously isn't one of them.
Neither is being respected.  -- Rick Moen  <linuxmafia.com/~rick/faq/>