Oh shit. I'm assuming no backups, in which case ... damn.

Any rapid programmatic solutions coming to mind? (Recovering the original FAT table occurs to me, but since the files have moved, that won't be much help).

Yep, no backups. Those photos were taken about... *looks at watch* 5 or 6 hours ago.

About the only thing in my favour is I reformatted all the cards a coupld of days ago (to set them all to something sensible for the cluster size), and so the files should be contiguous and ordered by time of shooting. Unfortuantly since chkdsk trashed the directory tree, fixing this is going to be tricky.

I also have a couple more cards where the folder containing the photos has vanished. Looking at the raw contents on one shows that everything's there, but part of the directory tree got eaten. Now to find a reference to FAT16...

lol, im sorry, its nasty to laugh...but someone has too

last time i ended up with a folder called FOUND.000 i left someone else to go sort it all out into its little folders again....ah the wonders of helping people when their machine screws up

Yes, but mine went and filled the .chk files with random junk. I have directory entries in the first 4k file (cluster size is 4k), and no file is bigger than ~180k. Average photo size is 700k. Funfunfun

What on Earth were you on when you decided to have chkdsk check your SM?