FAT32 Partition rendered unreadable

[bronzed_bison]

Hi,
I have a problem accessing my FAT32 partition on my WinXP / Fedora dual boot system:

Setup:
- WinXP on hda1
- Fedora Core 6 on hdb1
- Boots with Win bootloader
- GRUB on hdb1
- hdb1 is a primary ext3 partition
- hdb6 is(was?) my extended FAT32 partition for sharing files between WinXP and Fedora Core

Symptoms:
- On Fedora Core 6:
When I try to mount as follows: mount -t msdos /dev/hdb6 /mnt/osshare, I get the error message: mount: /dev/hdb6: Can't read superblock

- On GPartEd LiveCD:
GPartEd gives the warning: "Unable to read the contents of this filesystem! Because of this, some operations may be unavailable"

- (and for the record) On WinXP:
"D:\ is not accessible. The file or directory is corrupted and unreadable"
Also, at bootup it keeps asking me to check for drive integrity

Problem:
This partition was working fine till yesterday. I haven't done anything significant on either OS for this to happen. I don't want to delete this partition yet, because I have some large files there. Is there a way by which I can bring this partition back to life with the data on it? If not, is there anyway to recover the data on the partition?

I'd appreciate any help in solving this problem. Thanks

[devils casper]

post the output of 'fdisk -l' and 'df -h' commands. its possible to recover partition using TestDisk but i want to check partition table before suggesting anything.

[unchiujar]

In case you are unable to access the partition in a normal way you can try foremost to recover the files.

First make a bit by bit image of the partition using dd and then run foremost on it

[bronzed_bison]

post the output of 'fdisk -l' and 'df -h' commands. its possible to recover partition using TestDisk but i want to check partition table before suggesting anything.

XP started to behave real slow, so I had to disable D:.(I think some bgnd program kept trying to access D: ).. So I ran fdisk through a bootable CD(Nero) (since XP doesn't seem to have fdisk.exe anywhere)and here's the o/p(with D: enabled on XP):

Partitions on 1st Hard Drive(8032.4Mb, 1024 Cylinders)

No. Drive Start End Mb Status Type

1 -- 0 1023 10001.3 A HPFS/NTFS

2 -- 1023 1023 28176.5 N HPFS/NTFS

3 -- 1023 1023 38170.0 N FAT16X(20,LBA)

Partitions on 2st Hard Drive(8032.4Mb, 1024 Cylinders)

-- 0 521 4079.0 Free space
1 -- 522 791 169 3158.5 N Unknown Type 77h

2 -- 119 937 1720067.3 A XENIX bad block table(BBT)

3 C: 835 507 1360199.9 A XENIX bad block table(BBT)
-- 508 910 3161.2 Free Space

4 -- 911 476 1023171.5 A Unknown Type 6Fh
-- 477 1024 4290.7 Free Space

(I've left a space between entries)
I ran df.exe(there's no -h flag, though) and here's the o/p:

drive kbytes used avail capacity
C:\ 10487197 8973152 1514045 86% [Volume has no label] (ntfs)

E:\ 40004616 39232831 771784 98% [Volume has no label] (fat32)

H:\ 29545201 26695766 2849435 90% New Volume (ntfs)
I:\ 80023715 17819619 62204096 22% New Volume (ntfs)
------------------------------------------------------
160060729 92721368 67339360 58%

I: is an external USB hard drive.(NTFS no partitions) The fdisk output for the 2nd hard drive doesn't make sense.

My 2nd hard drive was formatted by gparted like so:
1. primary, ext3 20Gb
2. Extended:
- Linux swap 2.0Gb
- FAT32 the rest

Thanks again, devils_casper

[bronzed_bison]

In case you are unable to access the partition in a normal way you can try foremost to recover the files.

First make a bit by bit image of the partition using dd and then run foremost on it

Thanks. I'll keep that in mind

[devils casper]

a lot of bad blocks. i am not sure if TestDisk could fix that. try Testdisk first. download it and run its script in Ubuntu. if it doesn't work, try UBCD or SRCD.

[bronzed_bison]

a lot of bad blocks. i am not sure if TestDisk could fix that. try Testdisk first. download it and run its script in Ubuntu. if it doesn't work, try UBCD or SRCD.

This is TestDisk's analysis:

Current partition structure:
1 * Linux 0 1 1 2610 254 63 41945652 [/]
2 E extended 2611 0 1 4869 254 63 36290835
5 L Linux Swap 2611 1 1 2871 254 63 4192902
X extended 2872 0 1 4869 254 63 32097870
Warning: Incorrect number of heads/cylinder 16 (FAT) != 255 (HD)
6 L FAT32

Guess I'll have to reformat it and hope it doesn't happen again. Thanks for all the help