SD card...have i lost all of my pictures?

[VeeBee3]

Hoping someone out there has some suggestions. I was going to copy the pictures i have stored on the SD card from my camera onto disc to make a backup. However when i put the card into my laptop it keeps coming up saying i need to formatt the SD card? Now i've accessed the pictures on this card using this laptop many times with no problems and it's never asked me to do this before.

Have tried putting the card back into my camera to see if my pictures are still there but it keeps flashing up with a card error. I'm baffled as i last looked at the pictures a few days ago and they were fine.

Am hoping that someone can help as i fear i've lost all of the pictures on it

TIA

DD1 (6) managed to delete all our pictures off the SD card last week but we were able to buy software which got them back. (cost about £30 though) Google it and loads of companies will come up with it.

A lot depends on the nature of the error. If the card has failed totally there isn't much you can do, but there is a good chance that it's just one bit of memory that has failed and all your photos are still there. My wife had an error that produced similar messages, but I was able to recover all of the pictures on the card using a programme called PhotoRec from the TestDisk package.

Thank you very much for the info, have inserted my SD card into the laptop to try the fix suggested and it's now working fine so not sure what happened . Have very quickly made back up copies and will invest in a new card asap.

Thanks again for taking the time to reply!

Glad you got your photos off. A friend of mine had a similar issue some time ago. Luckily on my desktop it would occasionally read the card so I managed to salvage the photos eventually.

My advice with drives & memory cards is once they start to go. Just get rid. It really isnt worth the stress of going out one day, taking a load of photos then coming home to find actually it didnt work!

The cost of a 4GB card is peanuts nowadays. Esp from online retailers. It just isn't worth risking it for the sake of a few quid.