lost data on external usb drive when unmounting

[laptopray]

Hi.
I recently bought 2 Freecom XS 1TB USB drives to store my photos on, one acting as the back-up to the other. They are formatted in FAT32, as I need to access them from both my laptop (Linux Mint and my iMac (OS 10.4.11).
I have had no problems with them on either machine until yesterday, when I had them both connected to the Mac. I had ejected them (ie, unmounted them), then shut down.
On rebooting, neither disk had any folders on them although the Mac disk utility showed that over 140GB of space was used up. I connected them to laptop and, again, no folders or files showed up.
I have/had 15 years worth 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 folders and files? 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!

[dawgdoc]

Check this post by pluraldave for two file recovery apps available to Mint. There are also other recovery methods recommended in that thread. (I have not used any of these methods.)

I searched the forum for the term recover, then narrowed the search with photo. The referenced thread was the second listing.

[laptopray]

Check this post by pluraldave for two file recovery apps available to Mint. There are also other recovery methods recommended in that thread. (I have not used any of these methods.)

I searched the forum for the term recover, then narrowed the search with photo. The referenced thread was the second listing.

Thanks, dawgdoc. I'll try that later on today when I've finished work!

[laptopray]

SOLVED!

Many, many thanks, dawgdoc, for pointing me to the post from pluraldave.

I tried Photorec and it worked, although it took a long time!

All my RAW and JPEG files have been recovered in their original state, together with some document files. I have tried some of them out in GIMP, and they open and can be manipulated with no problems. They even have their original EXIF data still attached.

The only files to have suffered are the manipulated TIF files, which have all been transformed into very low quality PNG files. However, as I said before, it was the original RAW files I was concerned about.

Thanks, again.