Disappeared: 48GB of files on fat32 formatted external drive

All of a sudden my files from my MB Air (OS X 10.7.2) on a 300 GB Maxtor external drive disappereed.  The more info shows 48GB are used on the disc; the format is: MS-DOS (Fat32); and there is another partition for my PC docs, and it's fine.  Help!

Ok, confirmed. It is NTFS and according to the permissions I can only read it. The frustrating thing is that it says:
    - Capacity: 74.53 GB
    - Available: 50.35 GB
    - Used: 24.18 GB on disk
and yet at the bottom of the file list it shows "0 items"
Now the dilemma. The harddrive on my Windows laptop is very small (30GB) so I cannot copy all of my pictures to it. I could hook the old harddrive and the new harddrive up to it at the same time and move them from old to new, however...
The new harddrive is supposed to only be for the Mac so my intention was to format it that way. Because I am not sure if/how I am going to need it to resolve this issue, the box hasn't even been opened...so the first question is long term would it be better to have the new harddrive MAC or FAT32 formatted?
I have been assuming that Mac formatting was the preferred route so I am still brainstorming on ways to get the files straight from the old harddrive to the Mac. Could it just be a matter of the files being hidden on the old harddrive? How do I unhide them?

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    with very different skills and needs. My dilemma. I
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    software. It would be nice to backup the modestly
    used windows sector, but that's a secondary
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