Recovery of data off damaged ipod

Happy new year to all you good people!

Unfortunately for me the new year has not been going too well so far........
Hello there!

i fell asleep whilst listening to my 4th gen ipod and when i awoke i found the poor thing lying on the floor. When i turn my ipod on now i get the apple icon and then an icon showing a folder with an exclamation mark in a triangle. I have tried to plug the ipod into my pc and it is not recognised and i have tried to plug it in in disk mode again to no avail. I am aware that i can restore my ipod to original condition using the ipod updater restore option but i would lose all data. This, in terms of my music collection is not a problem, as i have all the cds already, but i have just recently returned from travelling around europe and i used my ipod as a hard disk to store my travel photos which are obviously irreplaceable. I would like to know if anyone has any bright ideas as to how to recover these photos as they are important to me.
Thanks in advance guys, any help will be greatly appreciated!

brumnick