[vox-tech] mounting new HD

[Kai Harris]

My roommates computer just crashed.  She is (was) running win98se and it 
appears to me that at least the windows directory (and possibly more) is 
corrupted.  It won't boot and there are too many errors on the disk for 
scandisk to handle so we can't reinstall the OS.
I am trying to mount the drive to my linux machine so I can burn her personal 
files to a cd.  However, when I try to mount it, I get this error message:

mount: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/hdb, or too many 
mounted file systems

this is the entry in fstab:

/dev/hdb /mnt/natalie vfat defaults 1 1

I got this line from a help file on installing a new drive at linuxnewbie.org
http://www.linuxnewbie.org/nhf/intel/hardware/hd_add.html

could it be that the drive is so corrupted that it isn't recognized as a fat 
filesystem?  I really dont know what else to try.  Thank you in advance!
Kai
p.s. my linux technical knowledge is limited, I wont be offended if you "dumb 
down" any responses!