I used the 'Stick' followed the instruction and even got a log file that said the card was prepared and ready to go. Well it went in the camera and definitely wasn't ready. Tried the 'wasp' and that didn't make sense of the card.
So, I learned about all this and set about manual card preparation using 'Mini Tool Partition Wizard - brilliant Windoze tool by the way. In this manual process and getting CHDK to boot I discovered a few things. Best to start with a 25 Mb FAT 16 partition, leaving the rest of the 16 Gb card empty. Then you can try the camera out and get it to boot CHDK, instead of the 'Card Locked' message from the internal OS. Then you take a photo to create the Cannon folder structure. Go back to Mini Partition and create the FAT32 partition from remaining space and move the CHDK folder AND DCIM older into the new FAT 32 partition. Ah, but Windoze doesn't see the second partition! No sweat, just hack the Hitachi cfadisk.inf file with your reader hardware ID and your SD cards now look like hard drives with multiple partions showing for read and write. Issues with NOT (hot) swapping cards and mounting to think about though.
From that and using the CHDK 'make card bootable' option I gort a 16Gb Sandisk Ultra card into multiple partitions and bootable.
With all the tools at hand I went back to have another look at Stick & Wasp. It appears that both utilities can appear to run and give satisfatory results when they are not. Mini partition Wizard showed me that only one FAT32 partition with CHDK files had been created, there was no FAT16 partition and remember I can now read both.
The built in 4 in 1 card reader is getting old now but I have a second USB card reader dongle which I tried. When Stick had finished I checked the card and this time it had prepared 2 partitions and put files on them. I closed the lock switch and it worked in the camera straight away. Conclusion so far is the card remove/insertion switching in this reader is suspect or intermittennt. Of course it's vital for both Stick & Wasp to move through their program stages.
In this thought provoking investigation I also put a 4Gb card in the camera ready to give up and use CHDK with 4Gb cards - the size limit for FAT16 and CHDK boot files MUST be on a FAT 16 partition. First I formatted it. Well what do you know, the Canon formatter formatted the card as FAT32 so CHDK would not boot. No probs, its just a matter of understanding that you need to set a cluster size of at least 64K in Mini tool Partition wizard and the whole 4Gb becomes FAT16 instead of just half the card.
Of course running Stick on a 4Gb FAT16 card means no double partition or Windoze reading hassle with Wasp.
Using 4Gb max size cards with Stick is the neatest solution for anybody wanting to try CHDK on Digic III cameras.My next concern is you are away somewhere with your dual partitioned photo card and needing access to photos for emailing or to copy for a friend. Well you might even walk into a photo shop for prints.
I can see 3 ways of dealing with this. 1. You have your camera usb lead and a fresh set of batteries to upload from the camera (I assume it will still do this?). 2. I've put copies of Stick and Wasp on the FAT16 partitions of my two 16Gb cards. 3. Find a computer not running Windoze (e.g Linux?)
I think if you want to shoot RAW saved to a single FAT32 partition, you go and buy another camera that will do it. But I am now happy I managed to get Stick and Wasp to work, although I did replace Sticks default CHDK folder with the latest stable version that included some modules I wanted.
