I'm wondering if you can format a jump drive with ext3fs. The reason why is that I have a couple of exercises that deal with creating ext3fs partitions, and I can't really locate a zip drive or disk.

Try it and find out, i forget what /dev name is for jump drives.

In any case, if you have lots of free disk space, why not create a lookback device?

change the "count" number to the size you want, or remove it all together. If you remove it, then dd will run until all your free disk space is eaten up, so if you do this, monitor your free disk space in another terminal, and kill dd (by using ctrl-c) when it gets about as big as you want.

The command will create a empty file of a size of your choosing. You can then create a filesystem on by:mounting it the device requires another option to mount:

yeah, probably the quickest way to find out. Here goes nothing

To answer your original question, yes you can. I ran mkfs.ext3 on one of my usb drives and now I use it for my user's home directory.

Cool. Will have to try that out.

Do note that flash media file systems have a limited number of writes (10,000-100,000). This means that journaling file systems may not be the best in the long run, as the journal will incur increased numbers of writes.

That being said, if it's just for experimentation (or you're willing to trash the drive after 100,000 writes... which is probably a long way off anyway) it's better than destroying your hard drive.

Remember that most USB-based drives will show up as /dev/sd*.

Only 10,000-100,000. Smoley hokes! Guess I'd better stick with FAT

Depending on your perspective, that number can be a little or a lot. For occasional file transfers, you're more likely to physically break it first. If you (for some reason) want to run a database off it... well, you're likely to update it a few hundred times (minimum) a day.

Good point. Not enough people know about that. That's why I replaced some of my . directories and most-often-written-to directories, such as documents and game saves, with symlinks to hdd locations. Note that you can symlink from ext->FAT but not FAT->anything.

In my case it has been for experimentation and portablility. Plus, the drive I'm using is a lost-and-found 1GB Memorex. Somebody lost it, I found it. So when it dies it'll be no big loss because I do keep it backed up regularly.