Can anyone help? After buying a Nikon D3100, I discovered that NEF files were not compatible with CS3, so at great expense, I bought CS5. Now... my raw NEF files are almost always corrupt when viewed in Adobe Bridge, Camera Raw or Photoshop.
They're nearly always OK when viewed in Nikon ViewNX 2
A classic example with metadata is here http://www.first-hit.co.uk/corrupt_nef/
Try converting the files from NEF to DNG with Adobe DNG Converter, and see if CS5 can open the DNG file.
I'd start conducting tests to see if I get the same results with a different card, as well as ensuring the underlying file system is correct (full format of the card), as well as trying the same card on a different machine, trying a different reader, and checking with a local photography club that someone else with the same camera model can produce something your machine could read.
(I was bit by a USB cable that had gone bad -- while I didn't think that could matter, substitution and testing proved it. It'd work just long enough to get some data over, and then corrupt things enough to even dismount.)
This is a very VERY long shot. But way back when, I remember having problems opening files (they were jpegs) in ImageReady. I ended up working out that it was because they had an odd number of bytes.
I can't remember now exactly where I was getting these odd-byte-numbered files from, nor how I went about padding them out, but my recollection is that it did fix the problem.
Just a thought...
