External Hard Drive Not Working

I have a 2TB Seagate GoFlex Desk external hard drive, and an Apple iBook G4 running OSX 10.5.8 Leopard.

I would like to run the external hard drive on both my PC and my Mac. The drive is already formatted to NTFS, and I found websites that had programs for reading and writing on NTFS with Mac, but when I installed it the drive changed to all Korean/Japanese/Chinese writing? So I uninstalled it and it went back to normal. Then I installed a different program and it did it again! Then another time! But this time when I uninstalled those programs, it remains in foreign writing? I can't even read it anymore! I can't remember the names of all the programs. I know one of them was NTFS-3G.

Are there any programs out there to read this NTFS drive that are free and actually work?

Sorry, no free programs that actually work. NTFS-3G is buggy and not recommended to use. Why don't you re-format that drive to FAT-32? Then it can be read and written to by both your Mac and a PC. The only drawback with doing it that way is that no single file can be over 4 GB in size. If you have no large files to store, that might be the best way to go.

Paragon NTFS ($19.95 from Paragon software) will work but as I pointed out above it's not free.

I had a feeling there would not be any good free progams, and I have several movies in iTunes that go on this hard drive that are over 4GB so FAT32 won't work for me, so I just backed up the external hard drive and then I went to reformat it for Mac and saw that Mac had the option to format to "Windows NT" so I did that, and now it let's me both read and write on the drive on both my Windows and my Mac!

There is no option on your Mac that would allow you to format the drive to Windows NT. You must still have NTFS 3G installed. If it worked for you, OK. But as I stated previously it's buggy and has been known to cause problems. Make sure you have backups of your data that's on the drive.

You can also go the other way around, use native HFS+ along with a third party driver/application on your Windows machine - have a look at HFS explorer.

There used to be a great utility called NTFS Mounter, but I've been told that doesn't work under Lion.

I use Tuxtera NTFS (cannot remember if there is a connection with Paragon) and it works fine ... but, not free.