RHEL5/CentOS5 fdisk refuses to display partitions after 15th ?

Vilius · 04-04-2009, 04:53 AM

Hi,

I have about 20 partitions on my disk.
When I issue "fdisk /dev/hda" I get this:

Code:

The number of cylinders for this disk is set to 60801.
There is nothing wrong with that, but this is larger than 1024,
and could in certain setups cause problems with:
1) software that runs at boot time (e.g., old versions of LILO)
2) booting and partitioning software from other OSs
   (e.g., DOS FDISK, OS/2 FDISK)
Warning: omitting partitions after #15.
They will be deleted if you save this partition table.

At first my disk is IDE so partition limit is not 15 but about 63, besides other distribution fdisks work just fine (slackware debian).

So why this fdisk behaves different than other distribution fdisks ?
How do I fix that ?

thanks
Vilius

lazlow · 04-04-2009, 11:58 AM

Ok, this is a holdover from SCSI (which has/had a 15 partition limit per drive). When libATA was written, they just stuck with the 15 limit(which serves 99+% of users). You can rebuild your kernel with pata-ide rather than libATA to get around the issue. The other distros you mentioned still use the older pata-ide system. You may want to consider limiting yourself to 15 partitions going forward, as most distros are (slowly) moving to libATA or libATA style solutions.

Alter Ego · 02-07-2011, 08:48 AM

see also this thread

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...ations-852006/