what partitioning rule am I not aware of?

[Clyde E. Kunkel]

Tom Horsley wrote:
> In an excess of energy I decided to see how many different OSes I
> could install to compare their behavior with a weird X bug I
> encountered in FC6:
> 
> https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=8790
> 
> I figured 20 gig was about enough for each root, and decided to
> create 7 small /boot partitions near the front of the disk (since
> so many boot loaders have problems with big addresses) and 7 20
> gig partitions after that for different kernels (my disk is a 160
> gig sata drive).
> 
> Windows has no problems doing this, but fdisk -l won't print any
> info about partitions after /dev/sda15 and if I try to install
> FC5 on a system that actually has an sda16 and sda17 partition
> (even if I don't try to use them for anything), anaconda blows up
> at the partitioning stage when it is about to try to partition
> and install.
> 
> If I go back to windows, delete the last two partitions, and
> re-install, all goes smoothly.
> 
> Is there some rule I don't know about on the number of
> partitions? Or is it a rule about the starting address of a
> partition (can't be too big maybe)?
> 
> Its really very irritating that they keep making disks bigger and
> bigger and software never seems to know what to do with them :-).
> 
Try parted.  Make sure you make the extended partition go to the end of 
the disk and then fill up the space in between.  Also, fdisk in Debian 
will allow you to go beyond 15 (I have 26 total on /dev/hda).  Not sure 
about /dev/sd* since I make large software raid partitions on my SATA 
drives and then overlay with LVs.

-- 
Regards,

Old Fart
(my reply-to address is "munged" to defeat spambots)