time machine and an external drive

hi

I have a 24 inch imac running the latest os, leopard

I am running time machine

I use an external drive, a maxtor 500gb

everything works fine in the mac OSX world

NOW, I want to use this drive in the MS windows XP world

but windows wont see it...


How do I get the drive back to "neutral" so that my windows machine can see it.....
I dont care about the data on the drive, I have another backup solution

thanks

al

any thoughts?


sorry for such the basic question, just want to be sure I dont brick the drive...


gonna try to format it on OSX, hopefully that will help

al