Formatting a 8GB CF the right way?

[nicholas]

You might want to use PFS3 instead.

Copy this to L: on your Emergency Floppy http://aminet.net/package/disk/misc/pfs3aio and install it to the RDB on your CF.

You can get the full installation docs in this older archive.

http://aminet.net/package/disk/misc/PFS3_53

[nicholas]

Exactly what Thomas said.  Once you've made your emergency floppy put that in the disk drive and your OS 3.9 CD in the CD drive and boot.  It'll boot into Workbench and you'll be able to format your hard drive and install the OS.  I actually just did this on one of my systems a couple weeks ago and was very surprised how straight-forward it was (for an Amiga, that is).    Even though I know 3.9 can support larger partitions I still try to keep mine around 2GB each, and test them thoroughly before putting any irreplaceable data on them.  You should be fine though.  

I'm sure PFS or SFS is a good idea, maybe one of these days I'll get around to trying them out too, LOL.  

PFS3 is brilliant, it's fast, doesn't eat much memory, is rock solid stable, supports 107 character filenames and huge partitions (~100GB IIRC).

I use it on all my 3.9 and MorphOS machines, but I still keep a small 3.1 bootable FFS partition "just in case" on my 68k machines.