Drive Setup for YDL (nathan r. hruby)

[Tim Seufert]

On Friday, May 9, 2003, at 01:03  PM, nathan r. hruby wrote:

> On Fri, 9 May 2003, Bill Judd wrote:
>
>>
>> Here's a quote from the (Mac OS X) man page for "pdisk", Apple's
>> low-level partitioning tool:
>>
>> "Creating more than fifteen partitions is not advised.  There is
>> currently
>>       a bug in the some (all?) of the kernels which causes access to 
>> the
>> whole
>>       disk fail if more than fifteen partitions are in the map."
>>
>> If you use Apple's "Disk Utility" to do your formatting, and you add
>> the OS 9 drivers, your first "user" partition will be #9 of 15.
>>
>
> Hurm.  Thanks for the info!  I'm going to have to reevaluate things a
> bit then.

On the other hand... that man page dates itself March 24, 2001, which 
is (if I'm not mistaken) the MacOS X 10.0.0 time frame.  I've seen it 
happen before that people bring up (on Darwin mailing lists) 
limitations mentioned in Darwin man pages, and some Apple guy says "oh, 
we fixed that N releases ago, just never updated the man page".  So it 
might be worth your while to do some experimentation, as this seems 
like a prime candidate for that sort of thing.  :)

BTW, under Linux there are sometimes problems with large partition 
counts: many x86 distributions used to install enough device nodes 
under /dev for 15 or 16 partitions per drive, that already being more 
than anybody could contemplate using with the horrible MS-DOS partition 
table format.  YDL (at least as of several releases ago) used to do 
this since it is a RedHat port, and let's face it, the demand for 16+ 
partitions is small even if you have a partition table not designed in 
the Stone Age.  After SSHing to a local RH machine, it does look as 
though recent RH distributions install 32, but it's something to check 
out if you run into problems.