I recently had a memory card fail on me on a recent trip (the filesystem somehow got corrupted) and I could not access the photos on it. I put the CF memory card aside, and left it till I got home. Once home, I used PhotoRec (in linux)to scan and recover all my photos from the CF card.
The file name of the files is lost, but all I need to do is sort by date in Bibble (my RAW converter software), which uses the meta-data date to sort, so the file name is not that important.