SATA - SCSI Partition limit

[John Duthie]

Problem:
     Need to simulate CDs shares on a linux/samba File server... has a
120 GB SATA drive in there ...

( linux-2.6.10 ) 

long story ...
      Shares had the wrong size for the evil VB program 
     (Tried mounting *.iso via loopbak - it didn't like it )
     Windows boxes that work just have lots of 700 mb partitions  ( 4
x extended with 6 or 7 logical in each )
     SO i thought "I know I'll just make lots of partitions"  oops ,
SCSI sub system only allows 15 Drives
  So now I could "Boot 2.6.11ac7 on it and specify the boot option
"all-generic-ide" " which worked wonders last time i had a problem
(Thanks Alan) because ide will allow more than 15 partitions.
  But the machine is now about 500 km away from me and changing a
linux system to boot from scsi to ide over ssh is not my idea of fun,
1 typo and I've got a long drive ahead :-(,
  are there any hard reasions for the 15 partition limit on scsi (
other than lots of dev files )

  how much work would a patch to halve the number of /dev/sd? files
and double the /dev/sd?[12]? files ( same number of devices
minor/major ) ?

I'm sure this will be a problem more people have as the SATA drives
get bigger.......

TIA
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