NTFS is Microsoft-proprietary file system, and MS is not giving any info to developper of other systems on how to access it.
Just like HFS can be read from Linux, but, AFAIK, can not be written too...(that might have changed though)
Windows is not even able to read HFS. Another thing is that MacOS is able to format a disk in FAT32, the size being only limited of the FAT32 structure (which I believe is 128GB, but am not sure).
Windows 2k/XP are not able to do this, their limit lies somewhere around 40GB. Win98 can handle and format a full size FAT32 HD...unlike it's "more evolved" successors Win2k/XP...
So if you want to use a large disk in FAT32, you need to format it from Windows 98....or from MacOS X.
So much about Windows' "backwards compatibility"...