reovery of a corrupted VFAT (FAT32) partition?

It looks like the disk controller on my desktop machine went bad, corrupting the hard drive. Unfortunately, my backups also turn out to have been defective; the second IDE channel, on which I'd attached my DVD drive, apparently went bad a while ago. :(

Is there any software on the Knoppix disk to recover files from CORRUPTED drives? The problem is NOT that I can't get into the filesystem, the problem is that Windows managed to shred the directory structure. The "Desktop" directory is empty; several others are garbled. A few are ok, and the file data are probably still on the drive, just inaccessible.

Alternately, does anyone know some open-source software to browse the raw partition? Preferably with some built-in filesystem knowledge for VFAT/FAT32?

The truly hilarious bit is that I wasn't even trying to write anything to the drive -- Windows just kinda managed to scribble crap in random sectors all over the drive while doing its swapping nonsense when I booted up and logged in.

Thanks in advance!

It is possible that the boot sector data is bad. If you run testdisk , it will check the primary with the backup and if they do not match , it will ask if you want to use the backup.

The boot sector data and the FAT's will be read and written to when ever you boot up with MS, if you read or write to the disk or not.

testdisk is on the knoppix cd but some versions give an error :see post if error http://www.knoppix.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=27288 about the 8th response.

testdisk's web site http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk
also read http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/Advanced_FAT_Repair