MacDrive is a great program that allows you to use Mac formatted disks on your Windows PC like a normal drive. Using the program, you can read and write data to HFS+ drives just like a normal Windows formatted drive.
Choose your preferred format.Mac OS Extended (Journaled) - This is the default file system format for Mac OS X drives. Advantages: Formatting your USB flash drive this way will give you full interoperability with Macs. Along with the ability to read and write to Mac disks and volumes, you can also create Mac disks for easy file transfers and backups. The built-in MacDrive Disk Manager gives you the power to partition, format, analyze and repair disks, while the newly revamped CD/DVD Creator allows you to burn Mac. I have a hard drive that came out of a Mac, I am trying to retrieve the photos from the drive. I bought a Sata reader to attach the drive via my USB port and once I attached the drive it spun up. There is a program that works with mac OSX Lion and reads and writes to NTFS formatted drive. Paragon NTFS is about £15 and reads and writes to NTFS drives – you won’t ever need to worry about what format your drives again. Some Mac drives may be formatted with the HFS+ file system — some drives marketed to Mac users may even come pre-formatted with HFS+. Windows can’t read this file system by default, but there are ways to read that HFS+ drive from Windows.
There a few ways that Disk Utility can format your external hard drive. From the dropdown menu labeled 'Format', select the format of your choice. You should choose depending on your intentions for your external hard drive. These are the most common formats:- FAT: Works natively with both Mac OS X and Windows computers, but is limited to a 4GB maximum file size.
- exFAT: Works natively with newer versions of Mac OS X (10.6.5+) and Windows (Vista+). Can work with large file sizes. This is the best option for cross-platform compatibility.[2]
- Mac OS Extended: Works only with Mac OS. Completely incompatible with Windows computers. This is the best option if you intend to use your external hard drive exclusively with computers running Mac OS.
- NTFS (Windows NT Filesystem): Works natively with Windows, Mac OS write-capability can be added using the steps in the previous Method. This is the best option if you intent to use your external hard drive exclusively with computers running Windows.
Active4 years, 4 months ago
I have some external hard drives that are Mac OS Extended (Journaled) formatted. What software can you recommend for working with those drives when under Windows? Do you have any experience with this?
Would be best if the software is free, but it doesn't have to be.
Hope someone can help!
quack quixote36k1010 gold badges8888 silver badges123123 bronze badges
SvishSvish17.9k5555 gold badges112112 silver badges170170 bronze badges
Reading And Writing Kindergarten
8 Answers
MarkMark
You can install Apple bootcamp drivers (no official download links but you can find it on other sites) on a non-Apple machine. This will install HFS+ (the other name for Mac OS Extended) drivers for Windows.
CharlesBCharlesB
![Reading and writing kindergarten Reading and writing kindergarten](/uploads/1/2/6/0/126030453/952913941.png)
For those with Windows 7, drivers can be found using Apple KB: TS3172
Der Hochstapler69.9k5151 gold badges239239 silver badges290290 bronze badges
SzymiSzymi
Seems like MediaFour MacDrive is the recommended one from various places. If anyone has any good and free alternatives or just other alternatives, I'd like to know about those though :)
Along with the ability to read and write to Mac disks and volumes, you can also create Mac disks for easy file transfers and backups. The built-in MacDrive Disk Manager gives you the power to partition, format, analyze and repair disks, while the newly revamped CD/DVD Creator allows you to burn Mac CDs and DVDs.
SvishSvish17.9k5555 gold badges112112 silver badges170170 bronze badges
I found the solution in here. It works just great. They are the official Apple´s driver set. It works with latest format (End 2012).
Irfan18611 gold badge66 silver badges2424 bronze badges
jonbarlojonbarlo
Have you considered going in the opposite direction?
NTFS on OSX
This is what i do. Any External Drive that i connect to my OSX machine that i plan to also use with Windows i make the volume an NTFS volume. osxFUSE(googlecode) will allow you to write EXT3&4,ZFS,NTFS, and basicly any Filesystem on your MAC.
Lightly SaltedLightly Salted61833 gold badges77 silver badges2525 bronze badges
Yes I've used MacDrive and its probably the only one around that works good.
Journal Of Research In Reading
Its sometimes buggy though, last I used was up to November last year. Don't know about the latest updates.
I've since changed all my drives back to NTFS, since Snow Leopard has (hidden) native support for writing NTFS files. (Google that - fstab ntfs mac) ;)
shrmnshrmn
I am using HVF_Explorer with a WIN32 system.HVF_Explorer does a pretty good job, and its free.
Greetings!
user36430