Just in case you guys are try­ing to use one exter­nal dri­ve for both Win­dows and Mac envi­ron­ments (as in my sit­u­a­tion), here’s some­thing that will save you all the grief and hours of sit­ting in front of your Macs

1. Down­load the lat­est Mac­FUSE Core DMG file and restart
2. Down­load the lat­est NTFS-3g + Mac­FUSE Tools (and Unin­staller if you want) from Fill­ing the Gap NTFS-3g page via NTFS-3G for OS X Revived Blog
3. Plug-and-play with your exter­nal. It should show up mount­ed auto­mat­i­cal­ly. If not, do a quick restart.

Hope that helps.

PS. The steps above is more updat­ed that what was post­ed over at this MacOSX­Hints arti­cle.

Update 2007-04-28
Grab Win­Clone if you’d like to backup/restore your Boot­Camp par­ti­tion. Great if you’d like to try out Par­al­lels using that WinXP NTFS par­ti­tion.

Update 2008-08-13
Step #2 above has been updat­ed, which links to the lat­est NTFS-3G for OS X devel­op­ment.