Jane, I may be out in left field here but......... Two things come to mind. Many digital cameras have a built in memory capable of storing a few photos, is it possible this is the case with hubbies camera? Perhaps the camera read an unformated card and switched to internal memory. Remove the card and try to preview photos that may be on the camera itself. The other thought is to open the memory card in Windows Explorer and have a look. Most seem to create a folder within a folder, I know mine does and I have had as many as 4 sub folders on the card before.

I'm not sure this can be done at all. i know the Brother design cards cannot be erased.Some time i read of using SD cards and a SanDisk card reader- SanDisk ImageMate, Model No. SDDR-77. They said the large slot will handle a Bernina card. I don't know what your cards look like, you might do a search into this. It could be an answer for you if you can find a reader that fits. They were selling for 10.95 to 35.95 on line

I agree with choosing SD over the other choices. However, I would counter the recommendation of going for one big memory card. Many people I know with digital cameras tend to leave the pictures on the card for a long time. If anything happens to that card (it gets lost, it gets corrupted and files are damaged, etc.), you stand to lose a lot more than if you had all those pictures on two 512 MB cards. And if that's the card you tote around with you and something happens to it, you may end up buying another card just to have some "film" to use. Just something to consider before you put a lot of your memories on one piece of silicon.

For an 8mp camera, I finally got a 2gb card and shoot RAW, you don't need quite as large a card for JPG. Still, at events, I sometimes do shoot in JPG and was filling a 1gb card in 1/2 hour, the 2gb card filled up in about an hour doing some street shots and a parade in RAW. It's best to set the camera to the finest quality possible unless they are shots where you need a whole lot but the quality isn't critical. You can't ever get lost quality back on your important shots. Then there are the bigger cards. The reason I don't want to get into larger sizes is that if the card gets corrupted, you lose more photos, plus they are a lot more expensive. I have had good luck with my Kingston cards which were cheap and slower, now I have one Sandisk Ultra II, both seem to be pretty reliable. There was trouble with some brands. Those things are so tiny, it would be so easy to lose the extra ones. I need a better plan to try to avoid that. Be sure to order the right card for the cam. They either take CompactFlash or SD (or proprietary memory sticks), and it would be easy to make a mistake on that.