Reading mac formatted drives on a PC

[katanita]

Can anyone advise? I am tearing my hair out.

I have a drive formatted for a mac, and I need to get at the files on my PC. I've tried HFS explorer, but it just tells me that it can't find the handler for this partition. I've tried Paragon's HFS+, which I've paid for, but the drive is still not showing up in explorer, and under disk management it can see it but tells me it's "unallocated" and won't let me assign a drive number.

There are definitely files on the drive, I could see them yesterday on a friend's mac. Any techy folk here have any suggestions? Or a mac that I could use to view the files on, perhaps?

Have contacted the software support and trawled the various tech forums, not finding anything.