Ext. hard drive wrongly formatted--accessible w/o deletion?

[RioSafari]

Thanks so much to everyone who takes the time to check this out. So, my boyfriend brought up an external hard drive from home in California that he loaded all of his important files onto. It is a Windows-formatted (FAT32, 1 partition, 250 GB) Western Digital USB drive. However, now that he's moved, he's in Mac territory, and I basically want to --access his files so that I can back them up and then reformat and partition the external hard drive--. It appears that the drive must be reformatted and partitioned before accessing files on a Mac, which is obvious but unfortunate. Can anyone think of any ways around this, where I could at least make a copy of the files so that they don't get deleted? Our only access to a PC would be the public library...or perhaps a personal media player. As it stands, the Mac (OS 10.2) recognizes that the device is connected, but no drive will come up--the manual says that the drive must be formatted before installing the software, which is now installed but not recognizing a thing. Thanks a million, everyone.
-Rio

[bobw]

You should be able to access a FAT drive on your Mac.

Connect the drive and open Disk Utility and see if it shows there. If it does, highlight it and click the Mount icon.

[RioSafari]

You know, I would have thought that would work...but no go. It shows up on Disk Utility, but the command-M "Mount" option isn't available. The drive doesn't show up on the desktop or anywhere else, either. All I can do is have it ejected, which it might as well already be. Thanks, though.

-R

[bobw]

Maybe the drive is only USB 2 and your machine doesn't support that.