Reading a Data Disk burned on a Mac from a PC

As I had mentioned earlier, we had a family reunion to celebrate the Golden Anniversary of our parents. We had four cameras clicking away and recording the indelible moments of our journey through Southern India: Trivandrum -> Munnar -> Madurai -> Bangalore. In end, we had a collection of over 950 pictures. Since these were all 8 to 10 MP cameras, this translated to a total size of 2.7 Gb.

I decided to collect all the pictures on my MacBook Pro and burn a DVD. Imagine my dismay when folks reached their respective destinations and said, "The DVD you gave us is corrupted. My PC is not able to read it." I quickly discovered that even though Apple claims complete compatibility with a PC, the disks are not compatible. I came across a software called MacDrive that is "the ultimate solution for sharing files between Mac OS and Windows". However, this costs $49.99. I could not ask folks to spend that money just so that they can read the DVD with the pictures. Some more searching yielded this free software that did the trick. Called HFS Explorer, it allows you to browse Mac volumes and extract files onto your PC.

It worked like a charm. After the program started, I said "Load System from Device":

Then I said, "Extract" and specified the Directory on the PC. About 2 hours later, all the photos were on the PC.