I am very interested in filesystems. creating filesystems on my database is almost a function that I apply routinely.. . but recently I have been reading up on filesystems and creating filesystem in The Rute Tutorial and Expo by paul sheer.. and he mentions the use of mkfs and mke2fs as a means of creating filesystems on partitions.. the concept seems to be more along the lines of what i may be trying to implement right now but I am not quite grasping the literal meaning of "creating a file(seperate) system on a partition" as a literal concept. my two questions are what are the most common uses of mkfs filesystems and how do I go about implementing them.
thanx moxxx68
ps which partition is safest.

Its not a separate system. All Operating Systems need a filesystem. MS Windows uses Fat16/32, NTFS. Gnu/Linux can chose from many filesystems; ext2 is one of them, more recent system choices are journaling system, such as ReiserFS, JFS, XFS, ext3. CD/DVD's use filesystem's, there are many as well; Joliet, Romeo, Rock Ridge, UDF....
Your using a filesystem now, check /etc/fstab, it will display which partition is using what filesystem.

When you create a new partition from unallocated space, you divide the hard drive into partitions, and each partition must contain a filesystem before data can be written to it.

mkfs are tools for formatting a partition with a filesystem. Once you have run fdisk on your harddrive, and created separate space (partitoned) you then can run one of the mkfs.xxx tools to format the space with a filesystem.

You run these tools on a hardware device, not for creating a filesystem inside your database.

Which partition is safest? The one that you just created, or one which has no data on it, or if you want to loose your data, and format the partition.

These aren't filesystems - rather they are just extensions to the iso9660 filesystem.

Cheers
ZB

Correct.

thanx for your input i am going to book mark this page and try to read up some more to make sure i am able to grasp the concept which is a little over my head.
thanx moxxx68