I need some help, please!

OK, I used to have a 770 cloned using the whole process in the Wiki and on the forum and had no problems (except for a bad download, but that wasn't me causing that). My daughter destroyed my 770, and finally, I got a n800 (because of the spiffy FM radio tuner) and a 2GB Sandisk SD card.

So I'm following the instructions about creating a partition in the Wiki, and after I'm down and ready to mount the partitions, I get "card is corrupted or unformatted" error messages. Now, Sandisk isn't under the posts about some cards needing low level formatting as it seems no one uses them. Am I to assume that this message means that my card needs formatting then or is it just a bad card? (I don't have a card reader, so I can't just pop it into my PC and format the card, so I'd rather it be a bad card so I can exchange it.)