OK, so here's how it works. Tested with 6 2960's. You CAN connect more than 4 switches via the stack cables while all switches are powered off, as the documentation suggests. Don't bother trying powered on, the 5th switch and on will stall at disabling stack ports and never recover. But when you power on all the switches, the master election takes place and three other switches are thrown in the stack. On all remaining switches, as the documentation indicated, become independant masters. The stack ports are automatically disabled. In this scenario, the independant masters would be considered provisioned because they have the master config on them. I was hoping there would be some redundancy with this config like if a switch failed it would automatically bring one of the independant masters into the stack to fill the void, but no such luck. The stack ports stay disabled until manually enabled again on the independant masters. Once you enable a stack port on an inependant master after one switch fails, it reboots and integrates into the stack. The only advantage I see here is that it eliminates having to plug in some stacking cables. The bad part about this design is that you have to reboot the switch to integrate it back into a stack and due to the way the stacking cables need to be cabled, you lose a redundant stacking connection on either end of the stack to a disabled stack port on an independant master. Theoretically you could configure a stack within the stack by keeping the independant stack masters separated with the disabled ports and enabling the connections between the independant masters, but I'm not sure I see any advantages there. So for my purposes, I think it's easier to stop at 4 (or less) and start a new stack at that point.
Hope this helped provide some insight on the topic. This is just my initial observations. I'll post more if I learn anything new.
On a side note, I'm not sure if others operate the way I do, but I come to these forums as a last resort. When someone just regurgitates some documentation to answer a question I find it insulting, because I've already read the documentation and now have questions that require further elaboration. So by doing so, you've wasted both your time and mine since I've had to read the same thing twice in order to sift and find a comprehensive answer. Just something to think about for future responses.
