External NTFS hard disk with a mac

Its hard to say why some files do not show up in NTFS. My experience is that I can read-only NTFS but cannot write. Perhaps this is one of those ghosts in the machine things (and it may work occasionally). Again, OS X only has partial NTFS support (don't ask what that means).

And Mac Extended won't be seen in Windows as far as I know.

 

It has full read support and no write support. That's all it means. OS X does not read files encrypted by Windows, and it will respect (more or less) Windows ACLs, so if security settings in Windows made particular folders/files viewable only to certain users (or only to local machine accounts), that's why they won't show up on the Mac. There are also sometimes quirks with the "hidden" and "system" checkboxes.

HFS volumes will show up in Disk Management, but will not appear in Windows Explorer and cannot be mounted by Windows at all without additional software.

MacFuse allows NTFS write support, but it's not perfect.