I see a lot of posts about writing to the SD card, but I believe my problem is different. I am unable to create the SD card during the process of building an AVD.
I
Also had this problem and after installing the i386 package I was able to create a SD-card for my Android emulator I had to do two steps
sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get install ia32-libs
After this was finished, I was able to create an emulator with a SD-card attached