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Creating and mounting Filesystem files

dd is your friend. All you need to do is tell dd to create an empty file of the appropriate size. I usually make it sparse to save time and to avoid allocating disk space until it's actually used. For example, the following command will create a sparse 100 meg file full of zeroes.

dd if=/dev/zero of=new_filesystem_filename seek=100 count=1 bs=1M

Now make a filesystem on that file.

/sbin/mkfs -t ext3 new_filesystem_filename

Mount the file for use. (It can also used for user mode linux without mounting)

mount -o loop -t ext3 new_filesystem_filename /mnt/tmp