rather stupid question about formating SD cards

[moojoe]

so I bought an EEE PC about a week ago, and installed XUbuntu on a 4g SD card with a 700mb partition for swap. after messing around with it for a while, I decided that it would probably be better for what im doing to just keep the normal Xandros system and use the 4g for other stuff. so after having tons of fun working to remove GRUB, I want to use the 4g for other stuff. So I pop the card into my vista machine to format it, and realise that I dont have access to the 700mb SWAP partition, like I cant even see it.
so the question is, how can I format the card so that I just have one 4gb FAT32 partition? I tried going through the disk management windows thing, but it wont let me play with removable disks.

Thanks

[Luke122]

Vista cant read the Linux file system used on the swap. Also, DONT USE A SWAP PARTITION ON FLASH MEMORY! Sorry, had to emphasize that.. the constant read/write of a swap partition will kill flash memory very very quickly. They just cant handle that amount of write/rewrite.

All flash memory has a "lifespan", a limited number of write/rewrites it can handle before it starts to error out... there is a possibility that the swap area on the card is aleady damaged, and that could be why it cannot be read, but I'd start by going through the ubuntu installer again, and when you get the partition manager part, delete all the partitions, and then just quit the setup.

Then, see if you can read it in XP.

Remember, no swap file in XP either!

[billygoat333]

you could just try to reformat the card, by the usual methods. even if windows can't see whats on the card, it will wipe it out (used this to format a usb card to the formatting system xbox uses and back to fat32 and it worked fine).

[Greco101]

Should be able to use wipedrive on it.

[.Maleficus.]

Should be able to use wipedrive on it.

That will still keep the filesystem as swap, and it'll still be a waste of 700MB.

Download the NTFS-3g driver and you'll be fine. It's a Windows driver for reading ext2, ext3, swap...