Maxtor One Touch III not showing up on Mac OSX or Windows?

[SynGatesFan200]

ok so i have this Maxtor one touch III external hard drive that i used to use with my XP computer a few years ago... its 500 GB. so i plug it in to my Mac and install the software and it doesn't show up on my desktop or my disk utility. although, it does show up in my system profiler. so, it didn't work for mac... then i went onto my parallels account that has windows 7 on it and it still doesn't show up. what can i do to fix this?

 

[Jamie-Jamie]

What software? I wasn't aware that extra software had to be installed to use an external hard disk. You plug it in and format it. You'll need to make multiple partitions, all of them FAT32, since Mac OS X I think will only read NTFS and Microsoft refuses to allow Windows to read/write anything that isn't FAT32 or NTFS.

But then, maybe the drive is dead?