I have attached an external USB disk to my debian gnu/linux system. The disk showed up as device /dev/sdc, and I prepared it like this:

• created a single partition with fdisk /dev/sdc (and some more commands in the interactive session that follows)
• formatted the partition with mkfs.msdos /dev/sdc1

If I then attach the USB disk to a Windows XP or Vista system, then no new drive becomes available. The disk and its partition show up fine in the disk managment tool under "computer management", but apparently the file system in the partition is not recognized.

How do I create a FAT32 file system which can actually be used in windows?

edit: I've given up on this and went with a NTFS file system created by windows. In debian lenny this can be mounted read-write but apparently it requires you to install the "ntfs-3g" package and explicitly pass the -t ntfs-3g option to the mount command.