T61/Vista won't recognize ext'l HDD w/partitions of OSX/FAT

[Popliteus]

I have a T61 with Vista that doesn't seem to recognize my external hard drive. When I plug the hard drive into the T61 (by USB2 and/or Firewire), the computer makes that classic "duh-dum" sound of attaching a USB device - but it does not show the common "installing new hardware" dialog, nor does it show the drive as attached in the My Computer window that lists all drives. I have tried booting up with it attached, no luck. No combination of things seems to work.

I have an icy dock external enclosure with a seagate drive. The drive has two partitions, one is OSX journaled (for use with Leopard's Time Machine backup feature) and one is FAT32 (so I can read/write to this partition using both the mac and the PC). The drive was formatted using the mac.

I would just like to have the T61 be able to read/write to the FAT32 partition - the entire reason I have it is to back up the T61.

Does anyone know where I can start to troubleshoot this? I was thinking maybe I could format the FAT32 partition to NTFS, but the mac does not have a utility for this, and I can't get the windows computer to recognize the drive. Any help is appreciated.

[GomJabbar]

FAT32 is not your problem. Vista can see FAT32 just fine.

Could your problem be related to the following?
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/929705/en-us

EDIT: One other thing. Does this external drive have it's own power supply and do you have the power supply plugged in? The USB port may not supply enough power to run the external drive without another power source for the drive.

[K0LO]

Could this be as simple as using Vista's Disk Managment console to assign a drive letter to the USB disk's FAT32 partition?

[Popliteus]

Well, I feel like a real moron...
I went to check the drive properties one more time. In a bout of inattentiveness, I had formatted BOTH partitions in OS X format. I could have sworn that I did the dual partition correctly.

Human error, just like almost every plane crash - explains it. Reformatted, and the problem is gone. Thank you all for the input.