MacOS – Unable to read last block of the device

The following procedure should format your SD card to make it usable again and cause bad sectors on the card to be remapped if that is part of your problem. Warning, erasing the wrong drive could make you cry so make sure that you know what you are doing.

1. Before inserting the SD card into your Mac, make sure that the write protect (lock) switch is turned off
2. Open a Terminal window and type diskutil list
3. Insert card
4. If an OS X messages pops up asking you to "Initialize... Ingore or Eject", choose "Ignore"
5. From the Terminal windows, type diskutil list once again
6. Examine the difference between the two Terminal outputs to determine the disk number for your SD card. You should be looking in the left most column for something like /dev/disk3 or 4 or 5 etc.
7. Now type diskutil unmountDisk /dev/disk# where # is the number you determined earlier
8. Here is where you must be VERY CAREFUL. Enter the following sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/rdisk# bs=64k and be sure to replace the # with the previous disk number. Note the 'r' in front of the rdisk in case you are typing this by hand instead of copy/pasting the text. You should be prompted for your password to run this command because it is dangerous
9. Be patient until it finishes. You can estimate time by opening the "Activity Monitor" application in Utilities and clicking on the "Disk" tab. At the bottom you should see the Data written/sec in red. It should be some number in MB like 5. (64 x 1000 / n) / 60 = minutes until it finishes where n is the rate in MB that you just determined or 5 in my example
10. Once the previous command completes, the card should be completely erased and ready for formatting. At this point you can close your Terminal and open the Disk Utility application to create an exFAT partition like you were trying to do earlier.

When you have this kind of error, typically it occurs because the device is mounted and there is something accessing the information on the mounted disk. Whatever is causing you to be unable to eject the disk is the same reason the disk utility can't unmount the drive to erase it.

Likely culprits for things still accessing your files include applications like Preview or possibly Dropbox if you use it to import the information. If the USB drives include songs, iTunes could possibly be accessing the information as well. You want to make sure that all of these types of apps are closed when you go to dismount.