Help! CF card problems.

[HKMonkey]

Our family is visiting my wife and I in Hong Kong for the first and probably only time. I filled my 256 MB CF card with my Canon G2, then switched to my 128. When I returned home to unload the cards, the 128 was fine, but the 256 showed no pictures. In the card reader, it shows an empty folder, but checking the properties of the disk, it shows that it's full. When I put it back in my camera, it says CF card full, but when I try to view them on the camera it says no image. Is there any way I can cheat to get the pictures off? I thought about going through in DOS, but it's a USB card reader, so DOS wouldn't see it, would it? If anyone has any ideas, I'm all ears!

[gsmx2]

I think that I would try hooking the camera to the computer and see what happens. GOOD LUCK.

gsm x2

[Aylwin]

If you open a DOS window from Windows then you should see it as a drive. Might be trickier though if you boot from DOS. Either way, don't get your hopes up too high. I don't think it'll be an easy fix (if at all possible). Good luck though!

[HKMonkey]

Success!! I did try to plug the camera into the computer, but that didn't work either. Someone told me to check out this freeware program:
http://www.pcinspector.de/smart_media_recovery/uk/welcome.htm
It worked great. It somehow looks on a low level on your media and finds things that Windows can't seem to find. Within about 15 minutes, all of my photos were recovered and saved to a folder to view. I highly recommend checking it out. I just hope you aren't forced to use it!