Help me recover data from an SD card
 

I took a bunch of pictures with my digital camera while I was in England this summer, and while doing so I ran into an error with one of my SD cards. I'm hoping someone can help me recover the images from the card.

It happened while we we're looking over some of the pictures and video on the camera. I was playing back a video I took and then the camera shuts off. Now, it says "memory card error" and I can't read it or take pictures on it. When I put the card in my laptop, Vista tells me that I need to format it before I can use it.

Does anyone have any insight into how I can recover the lost photos/video on the SD card?

Thanks!

The only thing I can think of is to treat it like any other disk/floppy drive and find some software to recover lost files. Everyone has a preference in software. I used this in the past with pretty good success:
Active@ File Recovery Software & Web Service. Data Recovery for Windows XP 2003 2000 98 ...

I don't know how this will behave if the drive is USB or treated as USB in the machine.

Many data recovery solutions will run at boot and can detect a USB drive. Maybe a USB adapter would help, if you don't have one.
Maybe the software HDD Regenerator? The trial version only fixes the first error on the drive however, so you might need to buy it. But there are probably free of cost or open source ones, if you look around you might be able to fix this for free.

Agreed. Sourceforge.net is a good place to look.

There are lots of file recovery software available on the internet, you can try one of them. I have used Stellar Phoenix Photo Recovery Software, when I lost my pictures of my big brother wedding last month. I used its demo version first to check whether my pictures are recoverable or not. After using it I was able to view my pictures in preview mode. I was satisfied with this software so I purchased full version and saved my pictures. You can also try this software. It can retrieve photos from any storage device like memory card, digital camera etc.

OK, I've tried a number of different recovery apps and none have found anything...BUT, I think there is a reason behind that.

It is a 2GB SD card, but all the apps have shown (and only searched) 8MB.

Any thoughts on how to get a recovery app to recognize & scan the entire 2GB?

Odd place to look, but what kind of camera was it?

I know I had an old CyberShot from Sony that had pics erased off a memory card, turns out Sony actually has(maybe had now) a program you could dl off their website that allowed you to recover stuff off of the memory stick.

hmmm someone just asked me to do this very thing the other week... i don't know if they were successful... but let me look back and see what I found for them.

This post on hackaday may be of use.
Recovering photos with PhotoRec - Hack a Day

Unless I am missing something, I don't see where Canon has an app like the Sony one that allowed me to recover lost photos off a memory stick.

Good luck.