How to fix errors when trying to erase an old external drive?

I have an external drive I used to use on my windows machine, which I wanted to erase and start using on my mac.
When I plugged it in to my windows laptop, the drive was there and I could access files.
I plugged it into my iMac and again I could see the drive and the files.
I went to disk utility and tried to use the erase feature.  I got some errors and retried.  The last error was 'file system formatter failed'.
Now the drive appears to be invisible on both the mac and the windows laptop!  Is there anything I can do?
Veronica

I agree with dianeoforegon the drive sounds like it is dead or dying, to be more specific it sounds like it is suffering from 'bit rot'.
You could try going to the partition tab in Disk Utility and making sure it is on GUID and not MBR or APM, then set it to a single partition and try to format it. Also you could try the security option in the erase tab to force it to write to each block as a test. The lowest level is to do no security erase but the next level up will make it write once to each block, this will be sufficient to make it test each block.
Disk formatting utilities are supposed to be able to detect bad blocks during formatting and to mark them bad and to use 'spare' blocks. Unfortunately Apple's Disk Utility seems to be totally useless at doing that. Even if you have a tool which can do this it is not wise to trust a drive with lots of bad blocks (a handful might be ok) as a large number is a sign the problem is spreading hence the term 'bit rot'.
The only tool for Mac I have seen which even attempts to map out bad blocks is Scannerz from SCSC.

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