Mac is saying it can't read my External Hard Drive

Somehow I have lost the partition on my hard drive due to corruption. The drive supports FAT 32.
When I connect to the Mac, it says that the volumes on the disc cannot be read by Mac. These files were all added to the hard drive using an older mac. I need to be able to connect to the drive and access the files that are already stored on it.
Can anyone help me with this? I am a little lost when it comes to this.
Thanks,
Andrew

An external HD consists of two primary components - the actual drive itself, no different than you might find inside your system and a drive enclosure.
The enclosure provides the interface (USB, Firewire, SCSI, SATA, whatever) and power supply (unless it is a 2.5" bus powered drive) that communicates with your computer's port of the same type.
Mounting is what a UNIX based computer system call recognizing a drive as available. OS X has BSD UNIX at it core, and common UNIX commands are available via the Terminal utility provided with the OS.
If your computer can not recognize the drive and wants to initialize it, and reports the size of the drive correctly, the enclosure is not your problem.
If OTOH, it is not "seeing" the drive, it might be a problem with the enclosure.
It sounds as though we are dealing with the first case - the drive is mounted, but the computer does not detect a valid file system on the drive. FSCK might, I emphasise MIGHT, restore the extant file system to health, but if the partition table on the drive is blown, it will not. I will go out on a limb and say you don't have a valid copy of the partition map, so you can't just rebuild it - few if any folks would have that.
If you care about the data, your best bet is the Disk Warrior program I referenced earlier. If that won't help, you could go the commercial data recovery route, but be prepared to spend mega bucks for a quality job.

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