[plug] usb storage howto

[Gavin Chester]

Trying to work out how to put files on a SD card fitted into a mp3
player.  I have never dealt with these things before and guessed that I
had to format it first.  It's a 1GB card and I only have the mp3 player
to put it in - no external card reader.

I found a howto that had this to say:
"To format the drive in superfloppy format, you simply do: 
	mkdosfs -I /dev/sda
Formatting in harddisk requires more steps, if it's not already 
formatted that way: 
	dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda bs=512 count=1
to erase the start of the USB Key. After that you can do a
"fdisk /dev/sda" and create a new FAT partition (FAT16 is suitable)."

As well as that I vaguely remember (was it on this list?) talk that
linux won't recognise a usb memory stick or other storage device unless
its partitioned.  Does this apply to my device's card or can I use the 
superfloppy format?

I identified the card was /dev/sdc on my system, ran superfloppy 
(seemed easiest), was able to mount the card and seemed to be able to
write to it.  But when I unmounted and disconnected the player it
complained that there were no files on the card.  A double-check
showed that mkdosfs used fat32 - is this a problem?  I had an idea 
that maybe fat16 might be needed :-/

Can anyone suggest where I'm going wrong or point me to a howto?

Gavin