what partitioning rule am I not aware of?

[James Wilkinson]

Tom Horsley wrote:
> 2. Linux treats SATA drives as scsi devices, and honest to gosh scsi
>    disks only allowed 15 partitions (historically, anyway, maybe
>    true even today).

Technically, it's not the *disks* that have the limitation. It's a Linux
limitation. Other operating systems may or may not have similar
limitations, but this one is solely Linux.

It's not even a limitation of the partitioning scheme -- it's the same
one (usually) as you get on IDE disks, the traditional MS-DOS
partitioning scheme.

The disks should neither know nor care what pattern of bits is laid on
them, as long as they can reproduce it faithfully. They should have
nothing to do with partitioning -- being SCSI, they may well be attached
to various weird and wonderful computers with different partitioning
schemes. In fact, they might well not *be* partitioned as we understand
it -- they might have LVM laid straight on the raw device (AIX), have
database extents that perform better if they're laid straight on the raw
device (Oracle), or be used in IBM's high-end "Shark" Enterprise Storage
products with multiple layers of virtualisation between the disks and
anything that the various computers attached to the shark actually see.

Hope this helps,

James.

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