External HD boot partition corrupted

Someone gave me a mac external hd (hfs+) that they plugged into a windows machine, and now the partition table is messed up, and I can't mount or access any of the files I need to recover (which are in an uncorrupted partition).

Are there any known ways to fix this? I can see the HD in disk utility, but I can't do anything with it. I also can't mount it in linux, but I can at least see that one of the partitions was changed from hfs+ to fat32. I know the data I need is still there, but I can't figure out how to get it.

You are saying that the partition was formatted to fat32 from hfs? To recover the data on the drive you might want to talk with a data recovery company.

And it will have to be real important as they can charge thousands. Windows machines ten for initialize and format a Mac drive. Connected up to you Mac what does Disk Utility say when you choose the partition?