[ILUG] dying hard disc - upgrade questions?

[Brian Foster]

  | Date: Wed, 26 May 2004 08:16:36 +0100
  | From: "Steven Satelle (Service Desk)" <Steven.Satelle at aer-rianta.ie>
  | 
  | Paul Jakma wrote:
  | > On Tue, 25 May 2004, Brian Foster wrote:
  | >>   + there is an indeterminate number of logical partitions per
  | >>     extended;
  | > 
  | > There may be limits in how many an OS supports though, cant remember
  | > if Linux has such a limit. It definitely had a limit in how many
  | > partitions can be on a disk (least for scsi disks - was limited to 15
  | > - probably still is).
  | 
  | AFAIK, Scsi had a limit of 15, and IDE has a limit
  | of (16 - 1(the extended partition which cant be used)).
  | This is not on OS limit, it is the disk itself which
  | cant handle it.

 eh?!!  no disc controller or drive I've ever heard
 of knows anything about the contents of the media,
 beyond how to locate, decode and encode the desired
 sector (which is very low-level formatting not at all
 relevant to this discussion).   or in short, the data
 stored on the media is entirely up to the software,
 including any “partitioning‟ scheme the software
 chooses to have (or is forced to have by some other
 software) --- just like magnetic tape, or floppy, or
 flopticals, or FLASH, or ROM, or most any storage media.

 what I suspect yer thinking of for SCSI is the limit
 of the number of LUNs per bus --- not partitions but
 drives --- which I seem to recall is c.15 (and I also
 have a very vague memory that some SCSI IDEs can appear
 as multiple LUNs for reasons I cannot recall at now?).

 and the claimed limit of c.15 partitions, be it ATA
 or SCSI or whatever, is a software artifact, albeit
 (unusually) _possibly_ not the BIOS for once!   and,
 what the limit really is is the most restrictive of
 those implemented by all the software which is ever
 going to be used with a particular disc installation.
 so, e.g., if you don't use diskdonkey, diskdonkey's
 limits/problems/features don't matter a fig.

cheers!
	-blf-
-- 
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