Memory card says unable to access

Hello,my wife has a canon D60 i gave her for her birthday and it came with a 16g memory card which i'm guessing is a cheapo brand since all it says on it is digital film. here's the problem she has shoot hundreds of great pics and 2 out of are 3 childerns birthday parties all seems great. she has never removed the card from the camera and has only owned for a few weeks, then today she turns the camera on and it says "error unable to access card" the lock tab is not in the locked position and she also tried accessing it from her laptop and get the same message. can i recover the pics with recovery type software?