more than 7 partitions on a SCSI-drive

[Christian Baer]

Hi folkes!

Is there any way to do this with FreeBSD?

Background:

I have to admit, that I have never actually done or even tried this with
any OS whatsoever. I am running a two drive system with two mirrors on
it. Because I wanted a lot of room for /usr while /usr/home ist mounted
on a different partition, the second drive is filled with the two
mirror partitions, /usr and a swap partition. Everything else is mounted
on the first drive. That being: /, /temp, /var, /usr/obj and the second
swap partition. Together with the two mirrors this means seven (in
words: 7) partitions. The table looks like this:

Filesystem              Size    Used   Avail Capacity  Mounted on
/dev/da0a               501M     72M    389M    16%    /
devfs                   1.0K    1.0K      0B   100%    /dev
/dev/da0d               1.9G    102K    1.8G     0%    /tmp
/dev/da1f                21G    2.9G     17G    15%    /usr
/dev/da0h               6.8G    742M    5.5G    12%    /usr/obj
/dev/da0e               4.8G     71M    4.4G     2%    /var
/dev/mirror/sec1.eli    9.8G    7.5M    9.0G     0%    /usr/home
/dev/mirror/sec0.eli     34G     21M     32G     0%    /usr/home/christian

What really sounds (and probably is) pathetic is that I have nearly 6
gigs of 'leftover' space on da0. Increasing the size of the mounted
partitions isn't really useful anymore (apart from reducing the free
space) as I for example probably won't be needing 2GB for /temp or more
than 5GB for /var - those are the sizes I have allocated now. Making /
any bigger than the current 512MB wouldn't bring any advances either.

Increasing the size of the mirrors isn't an option because that would be
schrinking /usr. Finding a new mount point wouldn't be a problem. I was
thinking something along the lines of /usr/ports. /usr/src was an idea
at first but since I want to keep that on a different physical drive
than /usr/obj, the idea doesn't seem that bright anymore.

But the
problem is that I can't allocate another partition, not that I ran out
of ideas for mount points. :-) On other machines with IDE-drives I had
one slice with partitions inside and never ran into this limitation
before. Is there any way to do something like that on SCSI-drives? We
are talking about SPARC64 here.

Regards
Chris