Help formatting a CompactFlash card with vfat & ext2

[sah]

complete newbie here to the linux/knoppix world. I'm working off of (not very clear) instructions to partition & then format a compact flash card from within Knoppix.

When I book to the Knoppix 3.6 cd, it does detect and mount as sda1 my CF card which is connected via a USB card reader. I am using a SanDisk 256MB card.
I did manage to get the two partitions created (I think) as follows:
sda1p1: size=8MB, format=b (Win95 FAT32)
sda1p2: size=the rest of the space format=Linux

Next, I need to format the 2 partitions (they aren't already formatted from creating the partitions, correct?). The commands in my instructions for formating the partitions are:
---
mkfs -t vfat /dev/hd*1
mkfs -t ext2 /dev/hd*2
---
so, I tried typing the following at a terminal:
mkfs -t vfat /dev/sda1p1

and I get the error:
/dev/sda1p1 - no such file or directory

Since, I don't know linux at all, I'm not sure where to turn from here. Am I in the wrong directory where I am typing this command? Do I need to mount the partitions first? Is the syntax of this formatting command incorrect? Any help anyone can give would be greatly appreciated! Please give as many specifics as you can in your response!

Thank you!

[mzilikazi]

Try:

mkfs -t vfat /dev/sda1