[PLUG] Mystery of the Vanishing Harddrive

[Charles Allen]

Here's the situation:
-A FAT32 partition (the sole one on the secondary drive)  was mounted
under Linux (Kernel 2.2.16-22 RH7.0)

-It had not given any problems beforehand

-Within the GNOME graphical directory program (I don't know what it's
called) the mount point was attempted to open.

-Instead of opening, the folder icon turned into a caution icon.

-The user shutdown the computer and rebooted it.

-When the computer had restarted the user was able to log in, but not
startx

-Root could startx

-When the drive was mounted under either Linux or Windows 2000 it was now
shown to be void of any data. (38 or so gb free)

-Scandisk in W2K reports no problems

Is this a problem with the file allocation table?  Can anyone suggest any
utilites to get some data back or to better test the drive?

chuck