partmap 15 limit
mascarasnake
yellowdog-general@lists.terrasoftsolutions.com
Fri Jun 4 10:04:00 2004
Thanks, Geert and bruce.
That's exactly the info I was looking for. Panther's Disk Utility is
what created that funky scheme, so I'm assuming that it'll handle more
than 15 partitions. It was running pretty happily on this disk before I
wiped it.
Geert Janssens wrote:
> I have never seen two separate partitions next to one another as free.
> When I free a partition with pdisk, it is always merged automatically
> with the adjacent free partition. Have you been using a macos
> partitioner ? In any case, I believe partition 9 and 10 could form 1
> free block. The other free blocks can only be merged by relocating the
> partitions in between.
>
> I don't know a particular tool that does this with a single click of the
> mouse. The manual way involves creating new partitions and copying all
> data from the old to the new partition, all while ensuring that the
> operating system in question can keep track of which partition has moved
> where. I know how to do this in Linux, I have relocated my root
> partition several times because of disk space limitations, as well as my
> home partition. I don't know how I should go about performing the same
> task under OS X though (I never got further than mac os 9).
>
>
> On a related note, it may be interesting to know that the 15 partitions
> limit is an old myth by now. I all has to do with the availability of
> the right device files in /dev. It used to be that several popular Linux
> distributions only provided 15 such device files for each possible hard
> disk.
>
> For example, for the first hard disk (on a IDE based system), you had
> /dev/hda1 up until /dev/hda15. The kernel uses these device files to
> access a partition on that disk:
> /dev/hda1 is used to access the first partition,
> /dev/hda2 for the second, and so on.
>
> Or if there are less than 15 partitions, the device files for which
> there is no corresponding partition point to nothing. The kernel simply
> gives an error if you try to use them.
>
> Having more partitions than device files for a given disk is more of a
> problem, because without a device file, the kernel has no way to access
> the corresponding partition.
>
> But, don't panic just yet. I see in my /dev directory that YDL 3.0
> apparently provides for 32 partitions per disk, so in your situation,
> you don't have to worry yet.
>
> Should you happen to come one day to the point that you have more than
> 32 partitions, then with the mknod command you can create more device
> files, up until 63 per disk. To understand mknod, see man mknod and also
> read file /usr/src/linux/Documentation/devices.txt. The latter is only
> available if you have installed the kernel sources.
>
> So, what linux is concerned, the sky is the limit :-)
>
> On afterthought, I don't know how well OsX handles more than 15
> partitions and in particular, how well it handles when one of it's own
> partitions (be it system or data) is beyond 15. Anyone else has info on
> this ?
>
> Hope this helps.
>
> Cheers,
> Geert
>
> mascarasnake wrote:
>
>> Just a quick question.
>> I've been following the 15 partition thread for a while now. I've
>> reformatted my main drive now in several different ways and keep
>> getting extraneous free parts that will take me above the 15 part limit.
>>
>> thinking about YDL 4 on this machine
>>
>> I'm running 10.3.4 on a B&W G3 rev2, all disks running on the internal
>> ATA bus(s)
>>
>> here's my part map for the drive I want to install YDL 4 on:
>>
>> 1: Apple_partition_map Apple 63 @ 1
>> 2: Apple_Driver43*Macintosh 56 @ 64
>> 3: Apple_Driver43*Macintosh 56 @ 120
>> 4: Apple_Driver_ATA*Macintosh 56 @ 176
>> 5: Apple_Driver_ATA*Macintosh 56 @ 232
>> 6: Apple_FWDriver Macintosh 512 @ 288
>> 7: Apple_Driver_IOKit Macintosh 512 @ 800
>> 8: Apple_Patches Patch Partition 512 @ 1312
>> 9: Apple_Free 19369792 @ 1824 (
>> 9.2G)
>> 10: Apple_Free 0+@ 19371616
>> 11: Apple_HFS Apple_HFS_Untitled_3 41680896 @ 19633760
>> ( 19.9G)
>> 12: Apple_Free 0+@ 61314656
>> 13: Apple_HFS Apple_HFS_Untitled_4 6029312 @ 61576800
>> ( 2.9G)
>> 14: Apple_Free 0+@ 67606112
>> 15: Apple_HFS Apple_HFS_Untitled_5 88499744 @ 67868256
>> ( 42.2G)
>> 16: Apple_Free 0+@ 156368000
>>
>> my question is can I combine the empty (9, 10, 12, 14, and 16) without
>> killing it all?
>>
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