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Is 'ls' capable of showing a directory structure of a properly formatted device? If so, what are these formats?
Yes, it is capable. It should be able to handle most if not all of existing FAT variations, ISO9660 (CD-ROM), Linux's ext2/ext3, and Am*ga FFS and Am*ga SFS formatted devices/drives. Also it supports MBR (x86 PC) partition tables and RDB (which again, originates from Am*ga) ones too.
There are some cute caveats:
On a VFAT disk, any names which are 8.3 compatible will be presented in UPPERC.ASE so you have to be careful about pathnames and filenames.
The firmware doesn't current support MBR "extended" or "logical" partitions, so everything you want to boot from should be a "primary" type. That means, a maximum of 4 partitions.
There is also the problem that reformatting a disk using RDB when it was previously MBR will not work properly - MBR disks are detected before RDB, and the RDB block is further into the disk than the old MBR boot code and partition table which the firmware detects. If you take an old disk and reformat it make sure you wipe the first few kilobytes of the disk first
Code:
dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/targetdisk bs=512 count=1
it should be enough to wipe the first 512 bytes, but better to be safe than sorry).
The firmware should also support BSD slices (above caveat stands) and most definitely supports dedicated disks ('superfloppy' zip media, small usb keys, or just formatting an entire disk with a filesystem, no partitioning) and the original BSD 4.4 FFS, but not FreeBSD/NetBSD UFS and certainly not UFS2 or Sun UFS.
The filesystem and partitioning support it NOT that broad in it's implementation, so don't expect miracles. It's only designed to get you to boot from the most common configurations.
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