Not sure if this is still needed. This is historic issue related to bug in old ms-dos format.exe and/or fdisk.exe commands. They were too clever and were confused by previous data in the partition. I guess you can skip it but it shouldn't hurt. If it hurts then something is seriously wrong, did you really used /dev/mmcblk1p1 and not /dev/mmcblk1 with dd command? This is not good idea, default Nokia system expects first partition on card being FAT, if you insist on this you will need to modify few things or it will complain or fail. This is the problem, looks like partitioning by sfdisk somehow doesn't work for you (or you erased if via bad dd above). Can you repartition card in desktop linux via usb card reader? You can use swap on internal card partiton 1 (FAT) and still boot from partition 2 (ext2) on same card. This is IMHO the best setup. Then you have external slot completely free for other cards. Yes, I'd guess some problem with partitioning the card. Try also 'dmesg' command to see kernel log, if you don't see i/o errors card is probably not bad.