redhat fdisk anomaly

[dbeast]

I'm wondering why the output of 'fdisk -l' in redhat 8.0 starts with "warning-deleting partitions after 16".

I have both Libranet 2.7 & redhat 8.0 installed on an 80g hda drive (ext2 for linux, also win nt-fat16 & xp-ntfs).

They both agree on the CHS values (9729,255,63) but Redhat only shows logical partitions 5 thru 16 whereas Libranet shows them all (5 thru 24).

Redhat seems to work ok, except for the damn modem, but why the diff in fdisk output?

[x]

In a book (Coriolis ExamCram) covering RedHat 6.2, it says that the total number of partitions is limited to 16.
However, reading manpages for fdisk, Mandrake 8, it says there can be 63 partitions.
Could it be that RedHat 8 uses an old version of fdisk?

[dbeast]

I did check that. Redhat is fdisk v2.11r, Libranet is fdisk v2.11n, so I don't think it's the version.
Weird thing is the /usr directory for redhat is hda20 & it's there & usable so maybe just some kind of reporting problem ?

[horus]

[quote author=x link=board=1;threadid=6061;start=0#57847 date=1042618095]
In a book (Coriolis ExamCram) covering RedHat 6.2, it says that the total number of partitions is limited to 16.
However, reading manpages for fdisk, Mandrake 8, it says there can be 63 partitions.
Could it be that RedHat 8 uses an old version of fdisk?

[/quote]

As in all things, Linux is a very quickly moving target. For RH 6.X, this limit was, indeed, 16 partitions. In later editions this was almost certainly scaled up to accomodate increased numbers of partitions for clustering and other "enterprise" applications. The best place to see what's really going is in the man page for your particular verson of fdisk.

(I confirmed the Exam Cram entry and cross-checked with Osborne's RHCE Study Guide - they both say the same thing on this with regard to RH 6.X.)

According to the man page for fdisk included with RH 7.2, fdisk can accomodate up to 63 IDE partitions, or 16 SCSI partitions. There's a reference to /usr/src/linux/Documentation/devices.txt, also. The way it's written, it looks as though this is not either/or, but both in cases where SCSI and IDE co-exist. I can't speak from my own experience here, though. (Haven't fooled with SCSI hard drives much... and never in Linux.)

Hope this helps...

Later On,
horus