I'm trying to read a card and it says it's not formated. There's a number of bad danger things here:
The card could be bad.
It could have been removed during a read/write.
It could be something to do with shooting in heavy heat or with low batteries or switching Canon to Nikon. (I wasn't the shooter but the other two are on me).
I'll throw the card out once I have the pictures but these are pretty much the most irreplaceable pictures known to man. What can I do?
I initially looked at the card and was getting all sorts of error messages/can't read. I thought I removed all the pictures but hadn't not. I removed the card with out hitting safely remove but nothing should have been writing. I eventually put the card back in but couldn't get it to open. I did some safely removing but couldn't couldn't find the right device. Eventually I did find it but when I put the card back it said it wasn't formatted.
Note: despite appearances to the contrary, I'm not a moron.

