photo recovery memory card

I have lost photos on 2 mini memory cards. I believe the problem occurred when I took the card reader to work to pull off photos they wanted to see there. As the previews were coming up, suddenly they stopped popping up and instead little generic icons popped up instead. Haven't seen my lost photos since.

So then I've tried photo recovery software for the first time (CardRecovery and the free scan version of Stellar Phoenix turned up the same images on one disk). I hypothesize now the entire disk is full of multiples of the same few files, as that's what the card recovery programs show as recoverable. I didn't ask them to recover those as I had those 25 images backed up (ironically).

So I'm thinking at this point that the other 250+ images are lost, overwritten by these replicated images.

Anything I should try? (tragic loss; 5 weeks of vacation hiking/painting research photos)
Thanks!

 

Thanks!
Am running a scan now (PC Inspector) on the less problematic of the two damaged memory cards. Weird thing: in Inspector under the Select Device field, removable drive G and removable drive F pop up as options when I plug the card reader into G. PC Inspector's 'Drive State' message appears as "Ready" for G, and "Busy" for F.

Hmmmm....wondering if after this scan I should plug the card reader into F and see what happens?

The other memory card I had trouble with last night, says the disk is in use and won't let me eject it normally. I end up closing all programs and shutting down the computer but still don't feel confident it's closing as it should.

I'm wondering if tiny pieces of my photos are flying around in Tron-Land and might possibly be recovered still if this F drive problem is solved, and/or if I should refrain from trying to access that other card. Also how to get the F drive to quit popping up when nothing is plugged into it....I'm not fluent here, obviously.

 

if your data is overwritten, you should try professional data recovery software which can deep scan your data.