Fat32 partition corruption, unknown type.

[Lexicon101]

I've been using an external hard drive (formatted as fat32) for a couple months, storing almost all my data, my programs for a separate XP partition, and uh.. just about everything else (including a project I've been working on in blender that is very important to me) inside this disk. Recently I unmounted the partition, resized it, leaving a few gigs for expansion, formatting the other, now empty, partition to ext3. Initially, this partition was r/w only for root, but after a little searching, I ran nautilus through gksudo, then changed the permissions through that so that I was the owner. Now the problem lies with the FAT32 partition.

While running Deluge, downloading a few files, It gave me an error (can't remember what it was). I opened the disk, looked around, and saw every filename (Actually, way fewer than I had) with crazy symbols, except the folder deluge had been writing to. I unmounted the partition, hoping to get a look at it, run fsck on it, but running fsck returned only this:

Checking file /
/
  Contains a free cluster (2). Assuming EOF.
FAT32 root dir starts with a bad cluster!

After searching for a few hours, well.. frankly.. I don't know what that means, and I don't know how to fix it.

(Oh, I forgot to mention.. Long time reader.. First time poster. (I had to say it.))

[Lexicon101]

bump

[iaculallad]

Try using TestDisk to check your FAT32 drive.

[Lexicon101]

~$ testdisk /dev/sdb1

Unable to open file or device /dev/sdb1

it can't find the partition. It can find the new ext3 partition though, through the name of the folder it's mounted to..

Edit: (I can't mount the fat32 partition, so this isn't an option..)

[iaculallad]

Post whatever displays when you run:

sudo fdisk -l

and

sudo blkid

*Do post your /etc/fstab file

[Lexicon101]

~$ sudo fdisk -l /dev/sdb1

Disk /dev/sdb1: 183.5 GB, 183538865664 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 22313 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x00000000

     Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System

/dev/sdb1: LABEL="REMOVABLE" UUID="47E6-8FA8" TYPE="vfat"

# /etc/fstab: static file system information.
#
#  -- This file has been automaticly generated by ntfs-config -- 
#
# <file system> <mount point>   <type>  <options>       <dump>  <pass>

proc /proc proc defaults 0 0
# Entry for /dev/hda1 :
UUID=5cda37ee-90db-40dd-9163-c99d0d93c6aa / ext3 defaults,errors=remount-ro 0 1
# Entry for /dev/hda5 :
UUID=09b51a68-a2fc-47eb-8c8a-eb74fc61aa0b none swap sw 0 0
/dev/scd0 /media/cdrom0 udf,iso9660 user,noauto,exec 0 0
/dev/fd0 /media/floppy0 auto rw,user,noauto,exec 0 0
/dev/scd0 /media/floppy1 auto rw,user,noauto,exec 0 0
/dev/hda2 /media/xpdisk ntfs-3g defaults,locale=en_US.UTF-8 0 0