My sister and her husband stopped by our house in the middle of a move from Alaska back to the mainland. They had taken a lot of fun pictures of their trip thus far, and then the camera died. (Kids + camera = likely cause.) A new camera was easily enough acquired but my sister was sad that their pictures were lost. They'd formatted the compact flash memory card three times while attempting to get the old camera to work again.
I figured not much could be done at that point, but it couldn't hurt to try. Whipped out the old CF card reader and plugged in the card -- Windows told me it needed to be formatted. A quick Google turned up a handful of free flash memory data retrieval programs. 'Zero Assumption Digital Memory Recovery' cranked for a while and recovered nothing.
But then, on a whim, I installed another program. (Call me stubborn.)
PC Inspector Smart Recovery ran quickly and recovered all 181 pictures from the card. I love it. And it's freeware! So it gets the Tom Dalton Seal of Approval.