claudecat,

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The 16 partitions should be thought of 16 device names.

It has been long established, when we still started using Sata hard disks, tha total of 256 devices in the hard disk controllers. The kernel has long been written to permit 16 devices names per IDE/Sata/SCSI/USB hard disk. Since sda the whole hard disk is also a device name there effectively we can only have 15 partitions. Also one of the primaries must be converted to an extended partition and cannot store data therefore a hard disk has only 14 bootable partitions.

The partitioning tools between Gparted, fdisk, cfdisk, sfdisk, parted, etc, etc maintained to different vigor and while one allow more than 16 device names other may not.

Theoretically kernel newer than 2.6.28 should have no limitation on the number of partitions! However the various programs have not been revised to catch up with the changes in the kernel. More details in this thread

Another complication is the kernel can be newer than 2.6.28 and the partitioning tools are ready to exceed 16 device names but the distro's installer may not have been written to go beyond the 15th partition. This is the most common irritation.

The problem can be resolved tempoarary if you are willing to install the distro in one of the first 15 partitions and then move it to a higher partition. This is how I deal with them and most distros with new kernels will have no problem with the relocation.

Personally I believe Linux is ready to be installed into high number partition as Grub has no problem of booting it. The problem is with the partitioning tools because we still need them to be robust for sorting partition table if something goes south.

The partitioning tool that is currently able to create most number of partitions is one of the oldest "sfdisk". The graphic Gparted is pretty good too but one can write a script to create 130 partitions in seconds with sfdisk , as I demonstrate in this thread.

In general I would recommend sticking with cfdisk as the partitioning tool. It supports 64 device names so 63 partitions is the maximum. I would also limit the number of partition to a lower threshold of 60 because any space/gap between partitions (forced upon by the BSD/Solaris distros and MS Windows) attracts an allocation of device name.