OK, I lied, I've been trying this again since you posted your response to my questions.

Here is the problem, it would seem that the card may be corrupted. But I have a few questions, please excuse my newbness for the rest of this post.

When using sfdisk, it says that if you make a DOS partition you need to

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/mmcblk1p1 bs=512 count=1

Not being too familiar with sfdisk, I read up on it, and it appears that this is necessary. The man page I found online said to exit sfdisk, reboot, then issue the "dd" command above. So I tried that, but then the sfdisk program won't recognize the partitions, nor will mkdosfs or mke2fs. OK.

So, I tried next to only make one 2GB partition for ext2. So I sfdisk, reboot, mke2fs, reboot. Now I should be able to continue with "tar"ring the flash image over, following the instructions from the original post.

Next I do the ./initfs_flash script, reboot. I have modified the bootmenu.conf file to indicate mmcblk1 (since I only have one large linux partition now), and only the noatime option).

I try to mount /dev/mmcblk1p1, and there is nothing there.

sfdisk -l /dev/mmcblk1 says:

"sfdisk: ERROR: sector 0 does not have an msdos signature
/dev/mmcblk1: unrecognized partition
No partitions found"

I am not sure where to go from here. I am using an N800, and trying to use the external MMC so I can still utilize the swap built into the OS on the internal MMC.

Do I have to use a DOS partition on /dev/mmcblk1? It would appear so. Perhaps I have a bad card, or messed it up somehow with all this partitioning from the device?