Why is it that fdisk sometimes deletes partitons when I did not ask it to change anything? Merely asking fdisk to look at a hard drive on my computer seems to be dangerous. I would like to know what is wrong with the command below:

/sbin/fdisk /dev/hdb -l

I was trying to use that to see what partitions I had on my second hard drive. It gave me that info and also gave me this message:

Warning: deleting partitions after 16

I did not want it to delete any partitions. Which part of the above command tells it to delete any partition numbered higher than 16. Fortunately I did not have anything important on my last couple of partitons. I assume it actually did delete them although I can not remember how many I had to start with? Fortunately, all my of my various operating systems still seem to boot up ok. I was using Red Hat 9 at the time. To make sure I am describing what I did above, I carefully cut and pasted the exact command I used and a portion of response into this message.

I had a similar, but worse experience about two months ago when I tried to intall the latest version of Slackware. I believe it was Slackware that I was using at the time. If I remember correctly, I used this command to try and look at drive g:

fdisk /dev/hdg

Part of the response was that some of my partitions were being deleted. I do actually have a drive g on my computer by the way. The motherboard in my computer is designed to connect up to 8 IDE devices. I currently have 6 IDE devices connected to this computer. Fortunately, there was nothing important on that hard drive. The entire disk merely contained backup copies of various partitions. I still had the original copies of the partions on other hard drives. When I used Partition Magic to examine hdg I found that approximately 100 GB from three extended partition had been deleted.

I have mostly just used Partition Magic and Disk Druid for partitioning and do not yet know much about fdisk. What did I do wrong in the above command?

P.S. In my above post I ment to say that fdisk deleted "100 GB from the extended partition." I did not mean to imply that there was more than one extended partion on that hard disk. I only have one extended partiton on each of my four hard disks.

Be aware of using Partition Magic. When I was playing with windows I've found that it created improper partition entry in my MBR for extended partition (the last cylinder number greater than it was possible). From that time I haven't trust this stuff.

fdisk cannot handle more than 16 partitions on a single disk.