After booting from liveCD 2004.2 on a system with a SATA disk 'fdisk /dev/sda' shows all partions sda1 ... sda15 and above, but sda16 and above cannot be mounted because of the scsi partition limit. This excludes systems with more than 15 partitions as candidates for gentoo installation. There is no boot option which avoids this behaviour and ignores the treatment of the disk as serial ata, i.e. as PATA (?). Or is there one? Reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1.boot from liveCD 2004.2 2.fdisk /dev/sda, try to mount /dev/sda16 3.boot from liveCD Gentoo1.4, fdisk /dev/hda, mount /dev/hda16 Expected Results: boot: gentoo nosata (for example)
There is no option to boot using the ATA interface rather than the SCSI (libata) interface, nor will there be one. Also, the ATA interface is depracated and will go away in the near future from the kernel completely, so the only real way to work with more than 15 partitions is to use lvm. Sorry. Docs guys, can we add something to the documentation saying that you should not create more than 15 partitions unless plannin on using lvm?
I've added "and SATA" to the 15-limit paragraph in the handbook. I remain silent about the LVM since people will otherwise undoubtedly remark that there still is a 15-limit on _partitions_, just not on logical volumes. That and LVM2 isn't officially part of the handbook.
