Vista Automatically Reformatted Mac External to Fat32

Sorry I am a newbie so bear with me. I have Leopard with Bootcamp Vista Partition. I also have an external HD for time machine. When I boot into Vista and then back into Mac it seems as if Vista has changed the External HD partitions to Fat32 format as they won't mount and in Disk Utility under format it says MS-DOS (Fat32). I am clueless as to why it would reformat it (btw I am not dumb I didn't touch anything all I did was boot into Vista). I have Macdrive installed in vista, but I doubt this would do anything? Anyway, if you could just help me out I would appreciate it. Also just the partitions are reformatted, not the entire drive. When I click on the actual drive in disk utility it says formatted as HFS.
Message was edited by: Brian1502

I think the first thing to do is look at what you wrote happened.
Until I know how things work, I would not mount or have TimeMachine or my only good backup connected until later.
Vista even with MacDrive7 (which I still don't trust to give it write privilege) it won't "understand" TimeMachine file structure.
Use a separate USB drive; or flash memory, if you need to import some files.
Paragon has a $40 NTFS drive so that OS X can WRITE to NTFS partitions.
There are EFI and GPT partitions on your drive that are normally hidden that you can see from Vista side of things, that would show as FAT, but these are just 200MB and 128MB -- and don't touch those.
Disk Utility should actually say that your DRIVE is GUID. And that the volume is HFS+. TimeMachine requires drives be formatted with GPT, and volumes as HFS+.

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