External Hard disk cannot be detected by my MacBook Pro USB's

Hi
I have bought an external hard disk 2.5" and even though I have formatted it as FAT 32 still none of my 2 USB ports detect it. It is a hitachi drive 160 GB eSATA. I haven't use power with my external drive.
I ended up sharing it through a toshiba notebook I have for the kids running Windows XP and I transfer files though the Toshiba to the external drive. It's outrageous!!!
Any ideas?
thanks
Andreas

Hi Andreas,
OSX can recognize and use FAT32 partitions without additional help !
Your problem sounds to me as a power consumption problem of the external HD, meaning that the HD does need more power from the USB port than the MacBook Pro can deliver.
Best solution might indeed be to get the external HD on its own power supply.
Stefan

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