I have not followed every detail of this tread, but I think there may be some confusion here about low level and High level formating. Putting a file system on a disk is the same thing as high level formating. I have created ext2 file systems on a zip drive. The command (if memory serves) was "mkfs.ext2 /dev/sda4" mkfs has many options you may want to read them. I also keep a msdos system on a zip drive which I use with dosemu. This saves harddisk space, but lets me have access to dos if I actually need it. And of course these file systems are easily trasportable and mountable on other machines. According to the zip howto you can put a small linux system on a zip drive therby having linux available on any machine you attach your zipdrive to. That is the next thing I will try
Tom
