On Wed, 4 Jul 2001, scsijon wrote:
Also for linux, that would be 63 for a machine, can't see that there is any reason why you can't use partitions on other machines and mount them on yours. Surely you just need a mount point and permissions.
at least until 2.2, don't know if 2.4 or devfs changed this, the maximum number of partitions in a disk is: 15 for scsi disks, 63 for ide disks. the scsi disks have a major number of 8, with the minor mumber having 4 bits for partition, 4 bits for drive (there are other major mumbers possible for scsi disks, but i think the limititation of 15 partitions still aplies). a the bits 000 identifies the whole disk, there are 15 combinations left with ide disks, each controller has it's major, and the minor seens to be separed in 2 + 6 (2 for the drive, 6 for the partition - don't know why 2 for the drive, everywhere i read says ide controllers support only 2 disks, it could be 1 + 7...) there is some info on this and partitioning in general in the fdisk readme, located in /usr/share/dos/packages/util-linux/README.fdisk about dos and winblows, at least until nt 4/millenium the limitation of 24 drivers letters is valid (when darryl strauss wrote the paper to linux journal about linux role in titanic rendering, he mentioned the fact that linux was chosen because it could support many dozens of mount points, while nt was limited to 24) Best regards, Adilson Ribeiro