On Sat, 5 Sep 1998, Ken Nakata wrote:

> Hmm, I'm not sure if I understand your question here, but the limit of
> 8 partitions (actually 7) is the number of partitions recognized by
> and accessible to NetBSD.  NetBSD looks for the types it can use
> (i.e. A/UX Root, Root&User, User, Swap, etc.) first, then adds
> whatever left up to 8 in total (including the `c' partition which is
> designated as the entire drive).  You can definitely have more than 8
> partitions on one drive but some of them will be inaccessible to
> NetBSD.

That's how it's supposed to work, anyway. I've found that -current, with
some drives at least (Quantum Fireball's, Nomai), crashes on any access to
a drive with more than eight actual partitions. This seems to be
consistent with what other's with drive problems have reported, and with
other brands of drives, too. I imagine that this would be very difficult
to see if you had to make a filesystem and reinstall with every change.
I proved it to my satisfaction by munging the partition map with a disk
editor. Excise a partition map, OK, put it back, CRASH. Every time.
I can supply detailed instructions to anyone who would like to try if for 
himself.