usb hard drive won't mount after being unplugged without unmounting

First of all, hello all.

Second of all, i purchased a Seagate 250 GB HD yesterday and plugged it into my iBook g4. It worked spendidly, its FAT32 formatted.

I loaded all my media onto it and everything was working great. Then i brought it to my friend's house and plugged it into his MacBook. Everything worked great.

After that, i was out of the room but he, instead of first ejecting the disk, simply unplugged it from his computer. This i know to be bad.

It now won't mount on my iBook or any other computer (mac or pc) and only shows up on Disk Utility, but i can't access any of the data. It is very important that i recover this data, because it was literally all of my media- home videos, photos, movies, and tons upon tons of itunes music files. I ran some searches and came across the guy with the Western Digital, but it wasn't the same situation, so i made this post.

So my question is: What can i do? I know there are expensive programs that can recover the data, but is there a free one? i wish there was because it seems like such a trivial mistake to cost me $100. Also, is there some command prompt stuff i can do to recover it instead? I don't have a Linux machine, but i do have both a PC and this Mac.

Please help!
Thanks,
jimi

you said you can see it in disk utility? can you do a repair permissions? not sure if it'll help, but worth a try.

also have you tried all manner of options as far as leaving it connected and rebooting, or trying other windows machines, etc? i'm sure it uses a dedicated power supply, have you tried connecting it unpowered, then powering it up? may just be grasping at straws, but worth a shot, right?

hope you don't lose all your stuff, that would s*ck.

eric- i haven't tried your power ideas, theyre worth a shot, but i think its unlikely, because it iddnt work when i depowered it and popped it into a windows box. as for the disk utility, basically everything with 'repair' in it is 'grayed out' the only options it provides me is to reformat it, or erase it....booo...

i feel like if i purchased a "data rescue" or a "diskwarrior" i could get it quick and easy, but...its a large amount of money for a split second decision made when i wasn't even in the room...
once again thanks to everyone for their help!

perhaps you could get your buddy to foot a portion of the bill? would seem only fair.

maybe someone else has a cheaper alternative? especially for a one shot deal where you just want to recover once, then reformat.

note to self - do backups of files to disc soon!

Get a copy of disk warrior, if your file system is corrupted it should fixed the problem.