Obscure DOS question

[Sean 'Captain Napalm' Conner]

It was thus said that the Great Vintage Computer Festival once stated:
> 
> On Mon, 28 Mar 2005, Eric Smith wrote:
> 
> > If you aren't able to run the Linux mkdosfs command yourself, I can
> > send you a ZIP file containing an otherwise empty floppy image
> > created as described above, and you can use rawrite.exe or equivalent
> > to write it onto a real floppy disk.
> 
> Thanks for the offer, but I'd need to format a hard drive thusly.  This is
> a decent solution if I can't come up with anything else.

  I did a similar thing to format a 120M harddrive for a laptop.  I was able
to fdisk the harddrive in question, but couldn't format it.  So on my Linux
system, I made a file the appropriate size of the partition (using "dd" and
/dev/zero), then ran the appropriate mkfs command over the file, then
mounted it, copied what I needed, umounted it, zipped it up (it fortunately
fit on a floppy) and was able to decompress and write it to the harddrive on
the laptop.

  From there I was able to bootstrap the rest of the way.

  -spc (Did have to recompile my Linux system to support mounting of files)