Hey beerstein,
I just had a quick look on google, seems like formating a sd card in windows xp is the same as for a floppy or a flash drive.
1. insert sd card
2. open my computer (win xp)
3. right click on sd card icon
4. select format , or perhaps reformat option, and follow the prompts.
In the past I had a usb flash drive I had Ping Is Not Ghost(
http://ping.windowsdream.com/) booting from. to make it easy to deploy win xp via sysprep to computers without optical drives.
Once I was done with the image deployment, I formated the usb drive in windows xp so I could use it for something else. I discovered that windows would no longer auto open the drive when I inserted it. I tried it in linux and could not open the drive at all.
using the linux command
fdisk -l /dev/sda
to look at the partition info on the drive would results in a list of 9 primary partitions on the drive... Which should not be possible. So I tried all number of 3rd party usb drive formating tools in windows that did not fix the problem. I think because they do not REMOVE the partition on a flash drive, only format them...
I booted up a linux live rescue CD and did the following.
fdisk /dev/sda
- deleted partitions
- created new partition
- partition type fat32
- write changes
I then attatched the drive to a win xp machine and formated the drive as fat32, and its worked ever since.
I only just found out that I can format fat32 in linux with
mkfs.vfat /dev/sda1
or
mkfs -t vfat /dev/sda1
so I could have done the whole job in one os.