You're certain the second card is not defective? Can you use just that one, and prep/boot off it? I'm confident this should work, but getting a bit outside my experience at this point. By swapping the cards around you've ruled out any issue with the cable or card readers. What version of HDToolbox are you using? What partition size are you creating on them?
You're prepping both the cards exactly the same, but the second one isn't showing up on Workbench when you reboot, correct? Will any other software detect it? i.e., SysInfo, Check4GB, etc.? This last one is a tool I used before, it was able to help me troubleshoot an issue I had where several partitions on a card weren't showing up on WB. Might help to give it a quick run...
http://aminet.net/package/disk/misc/check4gb