Memory Card Recovery

I have a SanDisk SD card and since yesterday none of my cameras nor my card reader can find/recognize it.
I had a lovely day with two cousins from abroad I hardly ever see and it really saddens me to think I should have lost all the pictures that are still on the card.

Any suggestions on how to recover data would be greatly appreciated.

Edit: I already tried Photorec, which has helped me on several occasions before, but it does not see the card this time.

Edit 2: In the end I could pretty much rule out a data fault (bought a new, better card reader), so I had a look around for recovery companies. The ones I contacted were pretty expensive, so in the end I mailed my card to a company that specialises in memory card recovery and does not do hard drives as far as I can see. Most of the other companies were the exact opposite, so they instantly mentioned clean rooms and other sophisticated things.

The guys at recoverfab make sure you try to recover your stuff with one of the countless free tools (like Photorec) before you mail in your card. The other companies already charged a lot for that and got really expensive when it came to a physical fault/damage.

So, Thursday I shipped my card and today I already had a link to a 100-pic sample of my recovered photos. Once payment is through, I can download my pictures via ftp – needless to say I'm overjoyed as I had not thought to see my images again.

Should anyone have a physical fault with a memory card, I can really recommend the guys at recoverfab.

There's some more info and pictures over at dpreview-forums in case you're interested. In that thread I also learnt about ddrescue which did not help me this time but might come in handy in the future.

You could have used testdisk.

Thanks for your input but as I already said above, I had tried Photorec – which is the part of testdisk that recovers data. But it of course only works when you are somehow able to access the media, which I wasn't because it was physically broken.

So again: if there's no physical damage, there are a lot of programmes out there for free that can help.

If however the card is physically damaged (which mine was), one has to extract the chip, which is a delicate and usually expensive matter. I was happy with both service and pricing of recoverfab.

It is possible that something was broken or burned out between contacts on the outside and internals, or internal circuitry that makes it act like a hard drive.

In that case if it does not even show up as a device and fdisk cannot read it, any file recovery software would be useless, unless you cracked open the case and had the electronic tools read data on the flash from the inside.