Macbook No Longer Recognizes External Hard Drive

Recently I bought an external hard drive (Toshiba Automatic Backup Portable Hard Drive) to backup my Macbook (Mac OS X 10.6.8). I found that in order to have my Mac recognize the hard drive, I needed to partition it by formating it to MS-DOS (FAT). I had no problems after that and began to back up my computer. However, the next day, I plugged my external hard drive back in and the icon no longer shows up. I went to Disk Utilities and found it there, but it said that it was not mounted. Then I went to System Profiler to see if it was under "USB" but it did not show up. I have tried shutting down and restarting my computer a few times but each time is no different. I even added a USB 2.0 Hub but even that didn't work. Is there anything else that I could do? I have files already on there and some I do not really want to lose. Is there any uncomplicated way that I could be able to make my mac recognize my hard drive again?

ellybook7,
In OS X you can read from an NTFS disk but not write to it - at least not without thrid-party software such as Paragon's NTFS for Mac.
I'm not sure what was working FINE in Mountain Lion that wouldn't work in Mavericks.
Clinton

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