does anyone have experience of using a third-party recovery service?

Only that it is expensive. But I don’t know of any service that can access corrupt memory cards.

You could try Norton Disk Doctor, if it still mounts as a (albeit unreadable) drive. That should be able to get at the data and may allow you to reconstruct the file allocation table or whatever database it uses to store file positioning information.

As a complete amateur – I can assure you “I NEED DIGITAL” without it, I never trusted my camera to either (a) work correctly or (b) take good photos. I could never tell whether my pictures were ruined (and most were) because of me, my camera or the developer. Now I know (all 3), and I’m taking better pics for it.

You’ll definitely need to reinstall it, as when you formatted your hard drive you destroyed the system registry. You can install it over your current installation, and all the planes you have will still be there – a reinstallation at the same place should leave addons untouched.

In my experience, running XP, you have to keep D4 in the drive anyway, I’ve never been able to run it any other way.

But, it beggers the question, why did you have to reinstall XP? In my experience XP has been rock solid (that’s not to say some programs haven’t caused it grief (especially some commercially distributed Visual Basic ones (I’m thinking ESRI Map Explorer 2 here – it simply won’t work with many other VB based programs)).

I have to agree with Rob that cheap printers do not give good results. For £130, however (or cheaper if you shop around) you can get the Epson R320 which is very capable for the price, and will give photographic quality A4 prints (providing the camera quality is 5-Mp or higher at full resolution). Paper and ink is however not cheap. Photobox are one of the best on-line printers, but the results are sometimes disapointing when compared to a good inkjet print. One advantage of the on-line services, is that you do not have to worry about getting the print settings correct.

I can vouch for the Epson Stylus Photo range – some have the added bonus of being able to print directly on to specially prepared (printable) CDs & DVDs, which are only pennies more expensive than ordinary blanks.

Oh, and you can get inks from other sources, which are much cheaper. I haven’t had any problems with 3rd party inks. I use KC-Inks.

The Fuji is being updated in a few days to the S5600 – which is infinitely more capable, check it out here

I’ve found it for £279 – which has to be a bargain for a new camera in this class. Here!

If you have to do all this to every photo you take.. Then, You either need to change your camera, or learn how to take photographs properly….

1. Cant afford it. 2. Why? Digital enables me to take acceptable pictures without knowing anything. I dont have the money or time for courses. I have enough problems keeping up with my profession.