I just did a test, and I created 22 500 MiB partitions on a USB flash drive. They all show up fine under both Ubuntu 10.10 and Gentoo:
Code:
ls /dev/sdb*
/dev/sdb /dev/sdb12 /dev/sdb16 /dev/sdb2 /dev/sdb3 /dev/sdb7
/dev/sdb1 /dev/sdb13 /dev/sdb17 /dev/sdb20 /dev/sdb4 /dev/sdb8
/dev/sdb10 /dev/sdb14 /dev/sdb18 /dev/sdb21 /dev/sdb5 /dev/sdb9
/dev/sdb11 /dev/sdb15 /dev/sdb19 /dev/sdb22 /dev/sdb6
I'm not sure why you're having problems, but my suspicion is it's something to do with the way udev is creating device nodes. Perhaps there's a bug that limits the number of partition nodes that udev creates for "real" hard disks, vs. USB flash drives. (As far as Linux is concerned, your hardware RAID setup is just a regular hard disk.) Certainly it's not a GPT issue per se. You're correct that GPT supports up to 128 partitions by default. That default value can be changed, although it's only "legal" to increase it. (It can be decreased by GPT fdisk, and this seems to work fine with every OS I've tried, but it violates the specifications. Increasing the limit is fine, although some versions of libparted-based tools flake out with such setups.) In any event, if the limit were decreased to 16 partitions in the partition table structures, you wouldn't be able to create more than 16 partitions with gdisk (or anything else), so that's definitely not the source of the problem.
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