This is way over my head. Could you please explain step by step how I do this?
Looks like you've solved this, but I'll explain a bit for the sake of curiosity.
Every computer disk is just a a huge mess of 1s and 0s. There is no arrangement to it. In order to separate content this is first "partitioned". Each partition can be thought of as a labeled box of data, but the data is still just a pile of random papers with numbers on it. Some specialized applications use this as is because they like to manage things themselves (most notably some expensive databases do this management themselves).
However, if you want to use that data with structure, then you impose a filesystem on top of it. The filesystem is just a convention for organizing chunks into directory trees, files, and metadata (such as security). There are many types of filesystems with many different advantages and disadvantages.
Windows used to just use VFAT (which has variants), and then went to NTFS (which is much better than VFAT, but still has some serious limitations for advanced uses). The Mac uses the HFS filesystem convention, and to Windows, this is just a jumble of random noise. Windows has a disk controller driver, e.g., SATA, and once this is connected, then one has to have a driver for the partition scheme (e.g., old style BIOS versus UEFI). Once you have that driver, then you need a driver for the filesystem type. All computers pretty much understand the drive controller and partition schemes if they are semi-recent. That latter filesystem type though is different; Windows only understands itself. The Mac will understand itself, but Mac went a bit further and likely understands NTFS as well (this might require installing something). Windows makes it rather difficult to work with non-native filesystem types.
Linux is basically king of understanding filesystem types. There are drivers and software for working with all kinds of filesystems, and they are trivial to install and use. Linux can easily read or author just about anything with a small amount of knowledge. For example, it would be trivial to plug in a Mac HFS filesystem and copy it over to a Windows NTFS disk, or vice versa.
Sometimes Linux is a great tool even if it is just booted to a demo which runs in RAM without ever permanently installing it. This is slow, but it is a really good option in emergencies (Linux can fix some Windows issues which Windows itself cannot fix). Sometimes I use Linux to aid with disk recovery because not only is it able to work with all of those filesystems, but also because it natively supports methods of reading failing disks (Windows would just tell you to not bother trying).
macdrive.com
www.paragon-software.com
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