MMmm.. really need to see the serial port output from the failure.
But you could try wiping the paritition table from the card and then try again -- that might be all that was wrong.
From a Linux box: dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hdX bs=512 count=1 ...where you replace "/dev/hdX" with the actual device path to the CFcard on the Linux box ("lsscsi").