FAT32 drive/OS X/cant copy sessions off drive

[studiogeek]

Hi,
At a studio I work at a producer put a month of audio (pro tools) backup sessions on fat32 formatted hard drive (Lacie 250 Porche) without preping it as HFS+. The original drive failed so they need the backup. The sessions are for a major artists so it IS a problem for him. I am trying to help him out and I am in turn asking the help of the drive geniuses here as I am out of ideas.
The directory is most likely a bit corrupted as the drive only mounts after MUCH effort and quite rarely. Here is what i've done so far..............
I connected the drive to my powerbook running Tiger and finally got it running. I First ran disk utility and found out it was fat32. I knew Diskwarrior would perhaps toast a fat32 drive so I skipped it. I skipped ALL mac utilities. The second FW port on this Drive seems to be frying other drives FW ports (2) so I connected the the backup drive to another machine and mounted it via ethernet. I than tried to copy the files out to the backup drive. They would not copy because of permissions but I fixed that. They than refused to copy because they could not read the data in the .ds_store (error -39) files (even to the desktop) I than ran cocktail (for tiger) to delete the .ds_store files. That looked like it was deleting the files but when I turned on invisible files, they were still in every folder and sub folder on the drive. I attempted to delete them by hand (mouse) but they would not move.
(UPDATE) I just got one session folder to start to copy 58 gigs YESSSS.
I have tried 6 session folders and they failed but this folders .ds_store files I guess were not corrupted.
I am afraid to dismount the drive as it may never mount again. What are my options for the 30 other session folders?
Can I repair it on a PC without killing the resource forks?
Thank You
DAD

[Tommo]

If you have a spare partition on the Mac the drive is connected to you could try using Carbon Copy Cloner to get a local copy for you to work on, that would at least keep the contents of the external drive safe.

Just select one session folder at a time if you don't have enough space on the target drive.

Sorry I can't be more helpful.

[studiogeek]

Smart idea, thank you.
I got it all last night... somehow the laptop froze while trying to copy. ARGGGHHHH!
......but....... when I relaunched the finder and tried again.... the .ds_store files mostly copied fine...... strange but true.
Thanks

[The Ghost]

You can't copy files of 4 GB or more to or from a FAT 32 drive. So, I don't think you can clone them either since cloning is just copying. Before doing anything else to the drive, I would get it to a data recovery expert.