Partitioning a drive for spare free space...SuSE 9.0
 

I'd like to create a drive, much like a zip disk for SuSE 9.0 that has no particular filesystem... no /, /tmp, /home.... just a plain blank disk that I can mount and unmount and swap between systems...

It will be a ATA drive instead of a zip disk... and it will be swappable between a few different systems.... so I just want it to be a plain disk partitioned with XFS or ext3/2

(assuming drive exists at /dev/hdb)

Setup your partitions, with cfdisk (or partitioner of choice).

Create a filesystem on them (in this example XFS):
mkfs -t xfs /dev/hdb1
(rinse and repeat for each partition you made)

On the machines you want to use the drive you'll need to add an appropriate line in
/etc/fstab .
(Or use a long mount command.)
(Ex. mount -t xfs /dev/hdb1 /mnt/somewhere ; where "somewhere" is the place you want to mount it.)

As you've described what you're after, that should do it.
Best of luck