Gentoo Archives: gentoo-user

From: Alan McKinnon <alan.mckinnon@×××××.com>
To: gentoo-user@l.g.o
Subject: Re: [gentoo-user] Boot partitions (WAS: migrating disks (from mounts to disklabels
Date: Wed, 24 Nov 2010 00:39:46
Message-Id: 201011240239.05114.alan.mckinnon@gmail.com
In Reply to: Re: [gentoo-user] Boot partitions (WAS: migrating disks (from mounts to disklabels by Peter Humphrey
1 Apparently, though unproven, at 02:19 on Wednesday 24 November 2010, Peter
2 Humphrey did opine thusly:
3
4 > On Tuesday 23 November 2010 23:54:19 Alan McKinnon wrote:
5 > > 16 for SCSI is plenty in real life,
6 >
7 > Well, you'd think so, but in my meddling days I hit my head on the
8 > ceiling. My other box, with whatever version of IDE was current then,
9 > had three more.
10
11 Oh, I've hit that limit too. But each time I was being thick in the head.
12
13 Besides, with that many partitions, you are going to need more flexibility
14 than you can get with fdisk, you are going to want to move them around and
15 resize them, so
16
17 use LVM. Sorted
18
19 > > and it's a hardware limitation not a software one so the driver can't
20 > > be updated for this.
21 >
22 > That's what I was asking about. What hardware limit is that?
23
24 The SCSI disk controller will only deal with 16 partitions.
25
26 > > 24 drive letters has *nothing* to do with partition number limits.
27 > > They are not even vaguely related.
28 >
29 > Just, if you happened to have 24 partitions, Windows would be ready to
30 > label them all. Foresight? Windows? Must be a mirage.
31
32 No it won't label them, it will give them some arbitrary name ordered in some
33 arbitrary fashion and make that your de-facto access method.
34
35 It's perfectly reasonable to predict the user would want to name a disk by any
36 name they chose, and for the vendor to have made this possible right from the
37 very beginning. But no, it worked for floppies so we'll just keep using for
38 everything else even when it makes no sense at all...
39
40
41 --
42 alan dot mckinnon at gmail dot com

Replies

Subject Author
Re: [gentoo-user] Boot partitions (WAS: migrating disks (from mounts to disklabels Peter Humphrey <peter@××××××××××××××.org>