Smartmedia is data-hungry and ate my pictures?!

Aaaaaargh!!! Here's all the gory details, fellow geeks.

I am attempting to recover jpg images taken with an Olympus C-2100uz on a 128mb Dane Smartmedia card. I use Windows 2000.

The pictures were available for viewing on the camera, and I can see the file structure when I access the drive, but the folder for images shows zero files. The drive shows 90mb+ of space used, however, so I know there is data to be recovered.

I tried accessing the images directly from the Olympus using the USB cable as well as using my SanDisk Imagemate Smartmedia reader, but got the same results - the correct file structure with zero files shown.

I even tried plugging the card reader into my laptop, but it produced the same thing. When I attempt to view the card's contents on my camera, it says "no pictures".

Howie even went a step further -- Booted into Linux Redhat 7.3 w/ Gnome Desktop to see if it would see anything else, but all it shows is the file structure, and in that just one file: desktop.ini .

Any ideas? I am desperate here, but can't afford to send my card in to a data recovery service. The pictures I took today have sentimental value - HOORU!!! -and I really want to get them back. :(

Help!?

:) Kimberley