Lost data on external usb drive when ejecting

I have 2 Freecom XS 1TB USB drives to stare my photos on, one acting as the back-up to the other. They are formatted in FAT32, as I need to access them both from my laptop (Linux Mint 8) as well as the iMac.
I had no problems with this until yesterday, when I had them both connected to the Mac. I had ejected them, then shut down.
When I rebooted the iMac, neither disk had any folders or files on them, although disk utility showed that over 140GB of space was used up. I tried them with the laptop and got the same result.
I have/had 15 years of photos on the disks, and most of the files were RAW files (Sony ARW), with many tif/tiff and jpeg files too. Is there any way of my possibly recovering these files and folders? The RAW files are the most important to me.
I have searched the forum for ideas, but drawn a blank. Please help if you can!

Let me ask the obvious first. Have you attached the external drive back to the Windows machine you moved the data from. If so what happened? You might be able to recover using some free tools from this link. http://pcsupport.about.com/od/filerecovery/tp/free-file-recovery-programs.htm
Give them a try if your Windows box does not see the data on the drive and then use this tool from WD after getting your data back http://support.wdc.com/product/downloaddetail.asp?swid=119 to make an image if needed. Always remember to back up!
/DigitalDreamer

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