Hello everyone

I am in desperate need of help so please please reply if you have any idea how to solve my problem.
I have a kodak digital camera and have an SD Fujifilm 256mb card for it. It can hold up to (roughly) 150 images.
The problem is, I was recently on holiday and when I took the last photo....instead of getting a message saying "memory card full, delete images" (or something similar) - I got a message saying "memory card requires formatting". The only options I am given is to continue (which will format the card and delete all my holiday pics!) or cancel. But when I cancel, it does not let me view any of my images. When I hook it up to my pc....it is not reading the memory card, it is saying there are no images.
It seems like a loose-loose situation as I dont want to format the card and loose all my photos, but I cant view my images or transfer them onto my computer anyway.
Then there was hope, I found programs online which claim to recover deleted images from memory cards by using a card reader hooked up to the computer. So I go out and buy a card reader and download many programs to try. Unfortunately, the card reader does not even detect my memory card, it acts like there is nothing there. However, when I tried another memory card...it worked fine and the software recovered some deleted photos.
So, the main problem is this single memory card. All I want is my holiday photographs. Can anyone help??? I had a thought....perhaps format the memory card anyway and then use one of the recovery programs to recover them....but Im not sure if it would work and i dont want to risk it.
Please, please help if you can! Thank you x