If you use the empeg utility to install the developer image, it will lay down the filesystem in the image, so the only partitions that would need to be manually reformatted would be the music (4) and spare (2) partitions, making following Mark's advice a little easier.

And since the developer image has mkfs in it, you can just zap those on the fly, according to Roger's webpage: mke2fs -m 0 -s 1 -i 131072 /dev/...

That -s 1 will make a huge difference fscking large drives.

--Nathan