unable to repartition SD card from Android phone

[Mark Copper <mlcopper@gmail.com>]

Maybe I should just toss it, but I'm curious why none of my tools can
recover an SD card previously used for Android internal storage.

Here's how gdisk sees it:
gdisk -l /dev/sdc

GPT fdisk (gdisk) version 0.8.10

Partition table scan:
  MBR: protective
  BSD: not present
  APM: not present
  GPT: present

Found valid GPT with protective MBR; using GPT.
Disk /dev/sdc: 62333952 sectors, 29.7 GiB
Logical sector size: 512 bytes
Disk identifier (GUID): 7DA17515-4FE8-43DF-A424-86C8EA090235
Partition table holds up to 128 entries
First usable sector is 34, last usable sector is 62333918
Partitions will be aligned on 2048-sector boundaries
Total free space is 2014 sectors (1007.0 KiB)

Number  Start (sector)    End (sector)  Size       Code  Name
   1            2048           34815   16.0 MiB    FFFF  android_meta
   2           34816        62333918   29.7 GiB    FFFF  android_expand

Utilities like dd, fdisk, parted, wipefs, gdisk all report success in
modifying the partition table none actually do.

Here's an example:

 wipefs -a /dev/sdc
/dev/sdc: 8 bytes were erased at offset 0x00000200 (gpt): 45 46 49 20
50 41 52 54
/dev/sdc: 8 bytes were erased at offset 0x76e47fe00 (gpt): 45 46 49 20
50 41 52 54
/dev/sdc: 2 bytes were erased at offset 0x000001fe (PMBR): 55 aa
/dev/sdc: calling ioctl to re-read partition table: Success

But nothing is actually affected:

partx --show /dev/sdc
NR START      END  SECTORS  SIZE NAME           UUID
 1  2048    34815    32768   16M android_meta
ea26c4a2-1eb3-4dd3-90b4-a2f4c6e2d993
 2 34816 62333918 62299103 29.7G android_expand
43ad70ab-2890-fa97-93a1-ae5e86950d19

Can anything return this card to a single ext4 partition for external
storage/data transfer?

Thanks.