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Access Mac-formatted drives from Windows using MacDrive
I spend most of my time on a Mac these days, but I still have a few Windows machines that I need to regularly interact with. While there are ways to access Windows NTFS-formatted drives using a Mac, sometimes what you actually need to do is the opposite -- access a Mac HFS-formatted external USB drive using a Windows machine.
Fortunately, there's a solid solution to this problem. Unfortunately, it's not cheap.
MacDrive is a piece of software that you can install on virtually any Windows workstation-class machine: Windows 7 (32-bit & 64-bit), Vista (32-bit & 64-bit), and XP (32-bit), though they admit that Windows 7 support is still a work in progress. Once installed, your Windows machine can read from and write to Mac HFS-formatted drives with no additional input from you - just plug it in, and start working. You can even burn CDs and DVDs formatted for Macs.
Though MacDrive sells for a relatively steep $50, if you regularly need to interact with Mac users it is well worth the price. And if you'd simply like to try it, or have an emergency situation, there is a time-limited 5 day demo version available.
Comments
6
Subscribe to commentsRajaSep 10th 2009 10:16AM
I think snow leopard includes a free hfs+ driver for windows; that should fix this problem right up, at least in boot camp.
Zachary WaldowskiSep 10th 2009 11:33AM
It's read-only.
Joshua MeadowsSep 10th 2009 12:24PM
Holy crap, seriously? Is that on the 3.0 Boot Camp drivers? If so, goodbye MacDrive.
The OSX implementation of NTFS is read only as well; you have to install third party software to write to Windows partitions.
Frankly I'm fine with it being read-only though. I haven't had any trouble with MacDrive myself, but I set the drives read only from the start. I've heard enough people who don't who end up with corruption that I've always been scared.
Matias KorhonenSep 10th 2009 12:02PM
This problem wouldn't exist if Windows shipped with a decent selection of filesystems...
Microsoft could even prevent windows from being installed on anything but NTFS, but still include the likes of ext2/3 and HFS+. Heck, even if the support was read only it would be better than the current situation.
For one thing, FAT32 remains the only truly cross platform FS (important when using external HDDs and flash disks) and it is patent encumbered (as TomTom discovered) and has major problems with large files (>=4GB) and long filenames (>255 characters). Ext2 would be a perfectly decent replacement for FAT32.
hazardSep 10th 2009 11:58PM
There's been a few of these type of articles advertisements lately ;)
Found this from Google in a matter of seconds ..
HFSExplorer
http://hem.bredband.net/catacombae/hfsx.html
Open source and cross platform ..
neilSep 11th 2009 7:14AM
On a Mac, you can read and write to NTFS drives by installing MacFUSE and NTFS-3G. They're both free, open source, and come with handy installers. Works really well - you can even use Disk Utility to format drives as NTFS.
HFSExplorer isn't bad - it's free - but it doesn't integrate well with Windows explorer and requires Java.