Dear all.

With my 40 MB IDE Harddisk,
I want to install Slackware + Redhat + Windows.
However, it seems that 8 partitions are not enough.

I read somewhere that IDE can have more than 8 partitions,
but couldn't find the how-to.

Please help.

Thanks.

Hi Kocil

I'm currently multibooting :

Slackware 9
Red Hat 9
Vector 3.2 SOHO
Mandrake 9.1
Windows 98se

across 8 partitions with no probs.

As I understand it - you can have up to 16 partitions per IDE drive
This link mentions the 16 partitions idea.

http://www.linuxplanet.com/linuxplan...orials/4269/2/

Oh yes.
I can make a lot of partitions in the extended partition.

LOL
I though the extended partition can contains only 4 partitions,
and we had to make another cascaded extended partition

Thanks for the answer.

AFIK

The logical drives within an extended partition are organized in a
kind of linked list and there could be a potentially unlimited
number of them if there were enough space on the disk to hold them.
Linux has to adresse devices through major and minor device numbers,
though. Major numbers select a driver, minor numbers are
interpreted by the driver. The major and minor number are limited to
8 bit each. The SCSI driver uses a few bits of the minor number to
select a SCSI device (4 bits needed due to 16 possible devs on wide
SCSI). The remaining bits can select partitions on a disk, so it is
16 partitions total per disk on SCSI, one reserved for /dev/sd?,
leaves you with 15 useable partitions altogether (4 of them
primary).

Is this still true?
On IDE hardware there can be only 4 devices, leaving 6 bits for
partition adressing, 63 of them useable (4 of them primary).

Hi Kocil

It's 4 primary partitions per IDE drive - however - the 4th primary partition can be made as an extended partition containing logical drives - that's were we get our larger number of partitions from.

Mike - according to the article from LinuxPlanet that I linked to before - the 16 partitions are arranged as

3 Primary - partitions 1-3
1 Extended - partition 4 - logical drives within partition 4 number 5-16

so your actually only really getting 15 partitions per drive namely 1-3 as primary and 5-16 as logical.

Skyline
I agree with you but was just tossing in some additional (useless?) info. Just commenting that the max number of logicals is a linux OS limit and not hardware.