@Patrik Thanks! perseverance always pays off
I got the SD card working last night with Solidcore and Indiegoleman - I needed Fat95 from Aminet installed haha, all that time and that's all it was.
The 4Gb Sandisk SDHC works as well as the 2Gb Verbatim non-SDHC.
The 16Gb SDHC is not recognised at all, but Solidcore reports that it 'can work' if you delete the volume with 'fdisk' in DOS or 'diskpart' in the later windows and partition it as a 4Gb (FAT or FAT32).
I noticed my Workbench does not update when the SD is removed or put in, you have to reboot the Amiga... maybe configuration issue? maybe it just doesn't update.
Nonetheless I'd say I'm where I want to be now - just awaiting the new Ethernet module, but that's of no fault to the A1208SDE+
Again, massive thanks to all involved. Great team... It would be good to meet for some beers haha.