Another story of persistence and divine inspiration on a small scale making up for my foolishness.
I’m not a hardware guy, so sometimes I take it for granted that hardware will just work.  Earlier this year I got a new Samsung Galaxy S4 and pulled my 32 gig SanDisk SD card from my old phone to the new one.  Worked great for a long time, bunt a month or two ago it randomly complained that the SD card had been removed.  I assumed that it had come loose from the socket and just rebooted.  That worked.  It happened a few more times and I just restarted each time and it was fine.  Then once it came back and the S4 said it was blank.  I googlers for an answer and found similar complaints.  This time I took the card out and into my Win7 laptop and let it repair the card.  That worked.
At this point, I should have taken it as a bad sign and tried another card.
Son the blank thing happened more and more.  I was starting to resent the phone.  Then one day two weeks ago I couldn’t get it to reconnect even after restarting and reseating the card.  It was just reported as blank and the S4 offered to reformat it.  I tried it in multiple computers and other devices but the no luck.  My laptops built-in slot didn’t even cause a pop-up in Explorer.  So I contacted SanDisk and they said they don’t offer recovery services but they would replace the faulty card.  They recommended a service, but for 32 GB they charge $275.  A few snapshots and save games aren’t with that. 
So I tried playing around with it one more time before sending it in for replacement.  This time I got out a cheap USB SD card reader, which oddly enough gave a pop-up when inserted, though it still said it was unformatted.  I tried the demo version of ZAR, but it claimed the format was unrecognized.  Defeated, I thought I’d try the only thing left to do – I put it in the S4 and allowed it to reformat it. 
Well, the S4 did its attempt to reformat but then claimed it was blank.  So I thought I’d pull it to the laptop again and see of I could let ZAR try to recover files.  But this is the miracle – Windows recognised it and opened the folders!!!  So I quickly copied all the files off it! 
So persistence paid off, and now I can send the card in for a replacement (which will go in my Slate 7 because I’ve put a Kingston card in the S4 now).