Read files from old windows-formatted external USB hard drive Years ago, I used an external USB hard drive with my PC (most likely Windows XP at the time). I've been trying to recover some files off of the old drive, but I no longer have a Windows machine and the drive is not being read by my Mac. The drive powers on, but nothing happens. No icon on my desktop, no sign of the drive in Disk Utility, no sign in Finder. 

I've downloaded FUSE for OS X as well as Paragon's NTSF for Mac OS X, but still nothing. I'm not concerned with writing to the drive, but I'd like to get some old files off of there. Is there anything else that I can try?
You need to copy those documents to a windows machine. After that you need to format a USB stick MS-DOS (FAT32). Formatting USB drive as MS-DOS (FAT32) will alow you to use the USB on Windows and OS ! Will not alow you to write files bigger then 4 GB i think or 2.