Optio 330RS Problem - Optio 330RS Memory Card Corruption

I recently purchased an Optio 330RS, and have had a serious problem in corrupting my removable 64 Mb (Kodak) memory card. The way it happened;

While the camera was switched on I pressed the small "display" button three times (the button just to the lower right hand side of the digital display). This turns the display off without actually shutting down the camera, thereby conserving battery power and keeping the camera in a "ready to shoot" mode.

After a few minutes, I wanted to take another photo. Forgetting that I had turned the display off, I pressed the power button thinking I was turning the camera on (actually turning it off). Yes I know I should have noticed the lens was extended!!

Immediately realising my mistake, I tried to turn the camera back on by pressing the power button again (around 1 second after switching it off). Obviously the camera had not yet fully shut down when I did this.

The display screen stayed blank (despite there being around 70 photo's on the disk) and the lens did not extend. The small green power light and the red light underneath it (located in the black plastic surrounding of the eye piece) were however illuminated.

I could not turn the camera off, it had "frozen". After removing and reinstalling the battery I was only able to get the camera to power up only by either;
- Having the now corrupt card removed (operating on the camera's internal memory)
- Inserting a different memory card.

There appears to be no permanent damage to the camera itself, just my memory card (and about two weeks of photo's through Europe!! ). When I put the memory card into my laptop I can see that there is data there, however it is obviously corrupt (file size lists as 2.1 GB). The files will not copy, delete, open etc. I've tried running Windows based tools on the disk with no success.

Does anyone have any ideas as to how I can get my photo's back? My next step is to take the disk to a data recovery specialist however as I can not back up the data I am concerned that I may only have one chance at this (assuming they are unsuccessful and somehow wipe the disk).

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks.

Just a note to inform readers that I have managed to recover my lost images. I reviewed a multitude of data recovery sites on the Web and tried numerous demo's. The demo with the best ability to prove it could recover my images seemed to be here;

http://www.flashcardfix.com/imagerecovery.html

I took the plunge and purchased the software - low and behold I was able to restore 95% of the images from my disk!

My flash card was still inoperable after this, however I simply formatted in (using Windows Explorer) and all appears to be normal again.

If anyone experiences a similar problem, my advice would be to surf the web (I used keywords: data recovery compact flash) and try all the demo's you can to see which one will best suit your problem.

Thanks for the link Shannon.

A few weeks ago I managed to recover a friend's IBM MicroDrive (he uses it in a Canon G2) that had really gone awol. My search yielded the following programs:

www.imagerecall.com - good for CompactFlash, but not Microdrive. (Pretty good price too)

http://www.dtidata.com/products_bundle_05.asp (Digital Photo Recovery at $49) works with the Microdrive.

Hope that helps someone out.
Matt
(www.pbase.com/mattmatic)

Memory card corruption may occur due to various reasons like human errors, incorrect formatting of memory card,improper ejection etc but in all the situations the only solution you can go for is to format the card and then use memory card recovery software to completely recover as well as restore those formatted pictures.