The short story - shot 16 gigs of b roll, reviewed the first few and the last in the camera, saw all the clips - all was fine.
Put the card in a reader, saw 16 or so gigs of data, set and started transfer and went downstairs for coffee.
Came back. 1.5 gigs copied, transfer complete, everything else vanished.
Had more coffee. Thought.
I trust CF cards - headers get lost sometimes but the files have always been there for me, just a matter of finding them. So I tried the usual things. No joy.
Thought some more, tried a few more, more no joy. Cursed a bit.
Tried "PHOTORESCUE" demo which saved some stills for me a while back. It saw the 16 gigs that I knew were there (somewhere). $29 and 20 minutes later the files were back on a hard drive, 22 minutes later they were on two.
No great lesson on how to avoid troubles - some days trouble will just seek you out. S*** happens.
When it does Photorescue may save you time messing with other free or really expensive solutions. I just wish I thought of it first, if there is a next time I will.

Does it work for .mov files?

Wow- thanks for the heads up about that program. I too had a bad experience but was, unfortunately, more than a scare. I was never able to recover the files- the card ended up being toast. It was a brand new Sandisk 16gig too- first time using it ever.

Moral of the story for me: test all new cards before using them on a shoot!

Jonathan, It did recover all the mov files. I tried two other programs but they didn't see anything on the card, the Photorescue processed for 20 minutes or so and recovered all of them. It did generate a new name and number for each, ie "recovered 01" etc.
But it worked as advertised and saved me from having to shoot it all again.

Awesome! I will file that back for a rainy day. Thanks.

Is this a promotion for tape based capture? Can you image if this happened on a wedding shoot or some other one shot deal?

Luckily when it comes to most (obviously not all) CF problems like this, it's just about losing or corrupting the file list(whatever that is called) on the card and a program can go through and find the files and just add a new name to each one. For some reason I've heard this tends to be a little more successful to recovery consistently on MACs then PCs only because of the way OSX deals with files.

A good thing for everyone to know is this will work 9-10 times if you accidentally format your card in-camera before downloading to a computer since all your camera is doing is erasing the file list(again I forget the technical name for this) and not the actual files. This is why you should always have a laptop on-set and CF rescue program already on it (what if you don't have internet access).

Photorescue seems to be the best at finding digital media files (not a plug for program just personal experience trying more then one program in the past and what I've heard from others) but I always have success with Lexar's Image Rescue 3 as well. Haven't tried version 4 yet. I feel one should always have more then one recovery program anyways. Spending $60ish dollars total on two programs that might save a project is more then worth it.