howmany partitions per disk possible?

[Thilo Six]

Hi

I ran into a problem where i am not able to create partitions on my sata
disk above sda16.
In fact i have accomplished to create sda17 + sda18 with cfdisk but i am
not able to create an (ext3) fs on them.

# fdisk -l

Disk /dev/sda: 250.0 GB, 250059350016 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 30401 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
.
.
.
/dev/sda15          21292       22750    11719386   83  Linux
/dev/sda16          22751       24209    11719386   83  Linux
/dev/sda17          24210       25668    11719386   83  Linux
/dev/sda18          25669       30401    38017791   83  Linux

# mkfs.ext3 /dev/sda17
mke2fs 1.38 (30-Jun-2005)
Could not stat /dev/sda17 --- No such file or directory

The device apparently does not exist; did you specify it correctly?

Since the last partition that is possible is sda16 is that a limitation
because of some hex code somewhere?

Any ideas howto make the end of disk available?

TIA Thilo
-- 
i am on Ubuntu 2.6 KDE
- some friend of mine

gpg key: Ox4A411E09