Formatting an SD card with mkfs hangs indefinitely

I am trying to format an SD card following [this](https://archlinuxarm.org/platforms/armv7/broadcom/raspberry-pi-2#installation) guide. I am able to successfully create the partition table, but attempting to format the Linux partition with mkfs yields the following output: mke2fs 1.42.9 (4-Feb-2014) Discarding device blocks: 4096/1900544 where it appears to hang indefinitely. I have left the process running for a while but nothing changes. If I eject the SD card then mkfs writes the expected output to the terminal: mke2fs 1.42.9 (4-Feb-2014) Discarding device blocks: failed - Input/output error Warning: could not erase sector 2: Attempt to write block to filesystem resulted in short write warning: 512 blocks unused. Filesystem label= OS type: Linux Block size=4096 (log=2) Fragment size=4096 (log=2) Stride=0 blocks, Stripe width=0 blocks 476064 inodes, 1900544 blocks 95026 blocks (5.00%) reserved for the super user First data block=0 Maximum filesystem blocks=1946157056 58 block groups 32768 blocks per group, 32768 fragments per group 8208 inodes per group Superblock backups stored on blocks: 32768, 98304, 163840, 229376, 294912, 819200, 884736, 1605632 Allocating group tables: done Warning: could not read block 0: Attempt to read block from filesystem resulted in short read Warning: could not erase sector 0: Attempt to write block to filesystem resulted in short write Writing inode tables: done Creating journal (32768 blocks): done Writing superblocks and filesystem accounting information: 0/58 Warning, had trouble writing out superblocks. Why is mkfs reporting that we are "discarding" blocks and what might be causing the hangup? --------------- **EDIT** I am able to successfully create two partitions -- one at 100MB and the other 7.3GB. I then can format, and mount, the 100MB partition as FAT32 -- it's the ext4 7.3GB partition that is having this trouble. dmesg is flooded with: [ 9350.097112] mmc0: Got data interrupt 0x02000000 even though no data operation was in progress. [ 9360.122946] mmc0: Timeout waiting for hardware interrupt. [ 9360.125083] mmc_erase: erase error -110, status 0x0 [ 9360.125086] end_request: I/O error, dev mmcblk0, sector 3096576 **EDIT 2** It appears the problem manifests when I am attempting to format as ext4. If I format the 7.3GB partition as FAT32, as an example, the operation succeeds. **EDIT 2** To interestingly conclude the above, I inserted the SD card into a BeagleBone and formatted it in the exact same way I was on Mint and everything worked flawlessly. I removed the SD card, reinserted it into my main machine and finished copying over the data to the newly created and formatted partitions.