My first suggestion is to get a USB card reader. You can get one of these at your local electronics store. I got a 6-in-1 reader that reads SmartMedia, Compact Flash, MMC, SD and Memory Sticks for $5 at a local computer store. Make sure you get one that can read the kind of media that you have.
Once you installed the card reader, take your media card out of your camera and put it into the reader. Open up My Computers and the reader should show up as one of your removable drives.
At this point, I would suggest you download WinHex and try the File Recovery feature. The evaluation version of WinHex allows you to recover files upto a size of 200k. The WinHex site also has a very good Support Forum. There is a lot of useful information there.
If the File Recovery feature does not work, it has a Disk Editor feature that would let you try to look for your files yourself. This is a much more involved process. Be prepared to put in a lot of time into this with no guarantees of any success.
For any JPEG files, you should be looking for a header (0xffd8) and a footer (0xffd9). Usually if you copy everything in between into a new file, you will get your picture. Sometimes, thumbnails are embedded with a picture and as a result, you will get a smaller picture, or nothing at all. This is very much a trial and error process and thus is very time consuming.
That's all I have in terms of advice. Email me at
golfer617@lycos.com if you would like me to try to recover your pictures.
