Date: Thu, 28 Feb 2002 02:43:24 +1100 (EST) From: Bruce Evans <bde@zeta.org.au> To: gemorga2 <gemorga2@vt.edu> Cc: <scsi@FreeBSD.ORG> Subject: RE: IDE vs. SCSI partition and slice limits Message-ID: <20020228023032.E49219-100000@gamplex.bde.org> In-Reply-To: <3C7D3F5E@zathras>
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On Wed, 27 Feb 2002, gemorga2 wrote: > >===== Original Message From Bruce Evans <bde@zeta.org.au> ===== > >No, the slice limits are arbitrary. PC's support billions of slices. > >The limit of 30 is related to the first power of 2 that is strictly > >larger than what was thought to be the corresponding arbitrary limit > >on the number of "slices" supported in MSDOS and Linux. This was tested > >using MSDOS fdisk to create logical drives C: through Z:. IIRC, MSDOS > >fdisk wouldn't create any drives after Z:, but someone said that MSDOS > >supports undocumented drives that can be named using ASCII characters > >after Z. > > So is that 30 slices inside a PC style partition or thirty partitions (as DOS > considers "primary" partitions). I heard (probably incorrectly) that a "DOS" > readable partition table has only 4 "slots" for "primary" partitions. With > extended partitions I know you can have lots of "logical drives". It is 30 logical drives (as DOS mostly considers them; also consider each of the primary partitions to give a logical drive (even if it is empty)). The term "logical drive" is more technically correct and also easier to understand (once you understand it :-), but AFAIK it is not normally used in DOS-speak for the "drives" corresponding to the primary partitions. "Logical drive" is spelled "slice" in FreeBSD-speak. Bruce To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-scsi" in the body of the message
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