Hello:
C-joe is hot on the trail of your dilemma; cant fool that ole bloodhound!
your problem is your partition and fat table has become corrupt, you should NEVER format a drive larger than 127gig as Fat32! Fat32 does not support LBA (logical block addressing) and LBA is essential to get above the 127 gig barrier.
What happens in your situtaiton; is your Fat (file allocation table) has become corrupted
dotn write to the drive any more if you want to try to recover it!
many times in your situtation data will get written into the wrong partition, actually writing over data that should not be getting written over!
the best way to recover is Getdataback
http://www.runtime.org/
as for the pulling the hard drive outta the enclosure, I must disagree with that vehemently; USB external enclosures are normally sold without the drive in them! and I have inserted drive into the enclosures and removed them, installed that drive internally hordes of times! and never had a single drive failure.
In fact I routinely use external drives to transport my construction auto cad drawings from job site to office and then to architects offices and clients offices.
Many of the times I am given a work station to use for my presentations which are old and dont have USB 2.0 support that when I remove the drive from the enclosure and connect it internally to the "old beast" I am stuck working with!
let me tell ya, its very annoying to try using cad drawings on a USB 1.0 speed
unfortunately; you stuck with two decisions, buy the recovery program or reformat the drive and lose all data
in the end regardless of which path you choose >>>>> get that drive into the NTFS file system
if you do a reformat on the drive >>>> just use NTFS during format If you use the recovery program to get your data back; then after the recovery is successful and completed use the drive converter to change your fat32 drive to NTFS