I have been asked to visit a friend tomorrow to sort out a problem with an external drive his son has bought for his Mac. He can't access it from his family's PCs.

I don't know if he bought an Apple drive or a generic drive.

I know nothing about Macs but I suspect it is caused by the file system on the external drive being HFS Plus.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HFS%2B

If it's an Apple drive I wouldn't want to mess with it. It may be a Time Capsule.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_Machine_(Apple_software)

If it's a generic drive:

* when it's first plugged into a Mac does it ask if you want to format it to HFS+?

* is it possible to re-format it to FAT32 and if so where do you do find the command to do it? I guess you could do this from a PC.

Can anyone offer any advice on this matter please?