SLAC Windows machines are mostly XP (no more Windows 2000) due to recent migration to XP. Xilinx states that formatting CF with XP would not work due to multiple reserved sectors ( Answers Database: Record Number 14456 ) A kludge would be to do it in Linux and a procedure is introduced here.

• Login to a Linux machine as a root
• Connect the CF card to the USB CF writer
• Type in followings

      # /sbin/modprobe usb-storage  
      # /sbin/mkdosfs -F 16 /dev/sda1
      # dmesg
      (bla...)
      SCSI device sda: 128000 512-byte hdwr sectors (66 MB)
      usb-uhci.c: interrupt, status 2, frame# 255
      sda: Write Protect is off
       sda: sda1
      #

Details: Above procedure was tested with once-formatted-with-XP CF cards. So, if one has a brand new one, one may have to run /sbin/fdisk. If you want to check the content (assuming you have /mnt/usbstick),

/bin/mount -t vfat /dev/sda1 /mnt/usbstick