Showing posts with label maximum number of partitions can be created in linux. Show all posts
Showing posts with label maximum number of partitions can be created in linux. Show all posts

What are the maximum number of usable partitions in a disk in Linux

Linux can generally have two types of Disks. IDE and SCSI.
IDE
By convention, IDE drives will be given device names /dev/hda to /dev/hdd. Hard Drive A (/dev/hda) is the first drive and Hard Drive C (/dev/hdc) is the third.
A typical PC has two IDE controllers, each of which can have two drives connected to it. For example, /dev/hda is the first drive (master) on the first IDE controller and /dev/hdd is the second (slave) drive on the second controller (the fourth IDE drive in the computer).
Maximum usable partitions 63 for IDE disks.
SCSI
SCSI drives follow a similar pattern; They are represented by ‘sd’ instead of ‘hd’. The first partition of the second SCSI drive would therefore be /dev/sdb1.
Maximum usable partitions 15 for SCSI disks.
A partition is labeled to host a certain kind of file system (not to be confused with a volume label). Such a file system could be the linux standard ext2 file system or linux swap space, or even foreign file systems like (Microsoft) NTFS or (Sun) UFS. There is a numerical code associated with each partition type. For example, the code for ext2 is 0x83 and linux swap is 0x82.
To see a list of partition types and their codes, execute /sbin/sfdisk -T