External mac drive on Windows

[Timotheos]

Im not really a switcher and this is kind of a reverse switch thread but anyways...

My parents have a oldish PC with windows ME on it and i was wondering if there was a way to connect my external mac drive up to it. whenever i connect it the computer can recognise that there is an external device connected to it but it doesnt show up as a hard drive in 'My Computer'

I tried the free trial of mac drive which worked well until it ran out and theres really no way im going to spend money on a program for this task.

I was also wondering how likely the mac drive 'should' work with XP, I say should because I tried it on my flatmates filthy PC with XP, with probably tons of viruses and it showed up as a hard drive then would randomly disconnect and stuff. It seemed really buggy. I tried in on my Universitys PC's with mac drive and it worked fine there also.

Thanks for any help

[eric2006]

I'm guessing that your drive is formated in some form of HFS. PCs don't read HFS, at least, not without 3rd party programs. You could format the drive as MS-DOS, or FAT32, but you're limited to filesizes under 4 GB (which is plenty, unless you do video stuff).

[Timotheos]

I thought i would need a 3rd party program. Whats the chance of there being a freeware or shareware option?

I heard something about FAT32 once but i couldnt figure out how to format as FAT32 with disk utility.

I use the hard drive as a backup so i could erase it, copy what i want onto it for the sake of tranfering data with MS-DOS format then reformat to a back to what i have now and backup everything again.

[eric2006]

I don't know of any free third party programs, but if you format is as "MS-DOS", under the erase tab in Disk Utility, it will be formated as the FAT32 format that your PC can read. You'll loose all data on the drive if you format it.

[Timotheos]

I have encounted problems with copying data onto a FAT32 formated drive, most of the files duplicate themselves.

if i put 'image.jpg' onto my external hard drive.
I end up with image.jpg and _image.jpg.
Is there any way i can prevent this?