SD card problem with Mavericks

Here’s the problem.

Mavericks won’t acknowledge the existence of my SD card when presented in a card reader (I have tried two readers). It is a card I have been using with Lion on my Macbook Pro for some time quite happily.

There is nothing wrong with the card; it works just fine in our Windows machine and in my camera.

My SD card is a Kingston 4Gb card. It was formatted in the camera.

The camera was bought approx 2003. Its a digital Pentax Optio 33GS (top of the range at the time shooting 3.2 megapixels!).

On my Macbook Pro 15” (bought new approx 2010) the card does not appear in Finder but does appear in Disk Utility.

The information for the main entry on the LHS in Disk Utility is displayed as follows:

Disk Description: 4Gb Generic Storage Device Media

Write status: Read/write

The sub entry which appears as disk1s1 on the LHS is:

Mount point: Not mounted

Format MS-DOS (FAT16)

I attempted to erase the Card using Disk Utility; I selected the main entry on the LHS and I chose the format MS-DOS (FAT). This returned a Disk Erase Failed msg “Wiping volume data to prevent future accidental probing failed.”

I then tried again, this time selecting Windows NT File system (Tuxera NTFS) as I have Tuxera installed. This did not work either; it failed with the same error msg.

OK so then I tried Mac OS Extended (Journaled) but this failed as above also.

I am not quite sure why, but when I reinserted my card into my camera, my camera could not read the card so I had to reformat the card within the camera.

Oh yes, I also tried rebooting my Macbook with the card inserted but this made no difference.

I have run our of ideas. All help gratefully received.

Thank you. Carol