Format external HDD from Mac to PC

Well Google has been no help because all the tutorials are about how to format an external on a PC to work on a Mac.

Well I had to use my girlfriends external to install Leopard on her Macbook so we plugged the external that was windows formatted into her Macbook and formatted it so you could read and write on OSX. Well after Leopard was installed I plugged the external back into my windows computer to put some files on it.

My computer knows that the external is there and when I go into the Device Manager it shows it as being there, but when I go into My Computer it is non-existant. Even down in the corner by the clock it has "Safely Remove Hardware".

I plugged the external back into her Macbook and formated it as "Mac OS Extended", (before that it was formatted as "Mac OS Extended (Journaled)" so we could use it to boot Leopard).

Once I plugged it back into my computer it once again did not show up. So I then formatted it as "FAT" even though I know it's only good under like 16GB or something like that. Still no luck.

I'm at a loss here. Anyone have any ideas?

MS-DOS (FAT) is what it says exactly on the Macbook.

The format options are:
Mac OS Extended (Journaled)
Mac OS Extended
Mac OS Extended (Case Sensitive, Journaled)
Mac OS Extended (Case Sensitive)
MS-DOS (FAT)


Thanks in advance.

You should be able to format the drive from Windows but either way you want to use FAT-32 (which is MS-DOS on the Mac) and not NTFS. It sounds like you did everything right, I don't know why the Windows box won't read the drive that was formated as MS-DOS on the Mac.