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Date:      Sat, 01 May 2010 19:56:11 +0100
From:      Christopher Key <cjk32@cam.ac.uk>
To:        Jon Theil Nielsen <jontheil@gmail.com>,  User Questions <freebsd-questions@freebsd.org>
Subject:   Re: More than 8 partitions
Message-ID:  <4BDC794B.2060009@cam.ac.uk>
In-Reply-To: <y2z8f82c35c1004301044pd7168618qa23eb66438350a5d@mail.gmail.com>
References:  <y2z8f82c35c1004301044pd7168618qa23eb66438350a5d@mail.gmail.com>

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Jon Theil Nielsen wrote:
> Hi
>
> I'm running 8.0-Release on an external usb hard drive. and have dual-boot
> with FreeBSD on da0s2 and Windows XP on da0s1. I made a setup via Sysinstall
> with 7 partitions:
>
> /dev/da0s2a on / (ufs, local)
> /dev/da0s2b (swap)
> /dev/da0s2d on /var (ufs, local, soft-updates)
> /dev/da0s2e on /tmp (ufs, local, soft-updates)
> /dev/da0s2f on /usr (ufs, local, soft-updates)
> /dev/da0s2h on /var/log (ufs, local, soft-updates)
> /dev/da0s2g on /home (ufs, local, soft-updates)
>
> I have about 660 GB left unused on da0s2 that I would like to use for
> backups. But I can't figure out how to create one more partition.
> If i create a file for bsdlabel like
>
> #       size    offset  fstype
> i:      *       0       4.2BSD
>
> I get the following error message: "line 2: partition name out of range a-h:
> i"
> I have also tried with gpart:
>
> gpart add -s 500G -t freebsd -f x da0s2
>
> I get something like "gpart: index '9': No space left on device"
>
> I thought that 8.0 should support more than 8 partitions. Maybe it does, but
> then I don't know how to do.
> Any ideas?
>
>   
I believe that FreeBSD does support more than 8 partitions on a disk
(apparently up to 20 using gpart), but that you need sufficient entries
for these partitions to be created in the disklabel, viz.

gpart create -n 20 ...

Some testing seems to indicate that you can manually override this by
changing by byte 0x28a of the disk from 0x08 to 0x14, and that bsdlabel
/ gpart will then allow you to create further partitions on the disk.



Kind regards,

Christopher Key




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