External Hard Drive does not mount

I have an external hard drive that I was using on a mac. It was formatted to HFS and I used disc utility to format it to fat32. Then I connected it to my Vista PC and it does not show up under computer with my internal hd, ipod, etc. It only shows up in the "safely remove hardware" usb manager thing. How do I get it to show up so I can use it?

 

Go to control panel. Administrative tools (should be in the classic style control panel). Click Computer Managment. Then click on disk management. You should now see all volumes. Remove your ipod and other removable media. Now since Vista runs on NTFS this part is easy since you know your external is formatted with fat32. Select the drive and right click. You should get a menu with an option to Change Drive Letter and Paths. Click on Change drive letter and paths. Now click change and change it to something like Z. This should work. If not try connecting the drive to a rear USB port.

 

Thanks for the response. It mounts now but the only thing is I don't want to format it to NTFS because I would because I will be using it on other operating systems. I would like to format it to FAT32 but there is the 32 gb limitation and it' a 500 gb hard drive.

 

You're right, FAT32 does have the 32GB limitation; however, it also has the limitation of no files larger than around 4GB. If you're going to use this external drive with a number of machines, and you don't want to use NTFS, FAT32 is the best choice.

 

i ran into this same problem. when using disk utility to format as fat32, mac osx defaults to guid partition table, you'll have to go to disk utility, select your disk (not the volume), go to the partition tab and select "1 partition" under volume scheme, in the options menu select "master boot record", ok and then apply. should be good to go after that!