Iomega 80GB HDD not readable once formatted to NTFS

Hi there, this is my first post. Actually it is the first problem I encounter one year after my first mac purchase: an ibook G4 14".

I used an external hard drive (iomega 80gb hdd) formatted in FAT32 which worked well with both my ibook and my win xp pro laptop.

I decided to convert the external hd to NTFS for performance reasons, knowing (as I read infinite times on various forums) that it would be perfectly readable on my ibook.

Instead, as I plug in the hd, the ibook says it does not recognise it, and no icon appears on the desktop as it used to come when I had the FAT32 format.

I do not want to initialise the hd since there is some important data and I do not have sufficient space to store them temporarily. The data are perfectly readable by any win xp system.

Here is a screenshot on what the disk utility shows me:

http://i28.photobucket.com/albums/c235/mibov/Immagine1.png

I'm ready to give further information, if needed.

Thank you in advance. Ciao!

ibook G4 Mac OS X (10.4.6)