Re: [opensuse] Maximum number of partitons

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On Tuesday, 2010-01-12 at 23:20 +0100, Per Jessen wrote:

Carlos E. R. wrote:

By the way. The typical wording is 16 partitions maximum. Or perhaps
15. It is less, in fact. The limit is that you can have partitions
numbers 1 through 15 (0 means the whole disk). Numbers 1 to 4 are
primary, and one of those primaries has to be an extended partitions.
Thus you get 3 primaries and 5..15 logical, ie, 11 logical. Total: 14
partitions, as Felix says.

Isn't that only with the DOS partition table? A GPT setup will AFAIK
offer a lot more.

Er... no. The "clasical" partition table is not limited⁽¹⁾; it is the operating system which has limits. In linux the limit was due to using a combination of major/minor number for the /dev directory, using only a byte.

⁽¹⁾ Being strict, the partition table is limited to 4 partitions. As that
is not enough, somebody invented the trick of using one fake partition
(extended p) containing a chained list of partitions (logical
partitions) which is unlimted, being a linked list.

- -- Cheers,
Carlos E. R.
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