[tlug] Ubuntu won't format a 2GB SD card as fat 16

[Dave M G <dave@example.com>]

TLUG,

Yesterday I bought a 2 Gigabyte SD card, which will basically be used to 
hold podcasts to listen to on my Palm Pilot.

What I learned from my previous 1 GB SD card (Same brand, Panasonic, and 
everything) was that I need to format the card from within Ubuntu as a 
FAT 16 file system, with an MSDOS disk label. That way both Ubuntu and 
my Palm Pilot will both read and write to it.

Last time I did this using gParted, without any troubles that I can 
remember.

This time, I placed the 2 GB card in my card reader, and gParted 
detected it as an unformatted disk at /dev/sdd. So far so good. But when 
I attempted to format it, it just said there was an error and wouldn't 
write to the disk, without giving any other information.

After a little Googling, I saw that I should try this command:

sudo mkdosfs -F 16 /dev/sdd

But the return I got was this:

mkdosfs 2.11 (12 Mar 2005)
mkdosfs: Will not try to make filesystem on full-disk device '/dev/sdd' 
(use -I if wanted)

The term "full-disk" sort of confuses me. Does it think the disk is 
full, even though it should be brand new and empty?

I tried "-I" as it recommended, but then it said:
Bad FAT type : -I

I double checked to make sure the disk is not physically locked. And so 
far as I can tell from the web pages I've seen, there is no reason a 2 
GB card shouldn't work as well as a 1 GB card. That is, no one has 
posted anything saying "Oh, the 2GB cards aren't supported yet" or 
anything like that.

Any ideas what else I can or should be doing to format my card?

Thank you for any advice.

--
Dave M G
http://www.tlug.jp/wiki/User:Dave_M_G