• Mac Drive Reader For Windows
• Mac Disk Reader For Windows

Rakesh Shewale writes with a common question about formatting compatibility:

Have you ever saved an important file onto a flash drive or external hard drive on a Mac and then were unable to open it on a Windows machine? Or copied files onto your Windows external drive that you couldn’t edit on your Mac. Reading a Mac drive on Windows PC quad777 Jan 14, 2014, 11:22 PM Hi Guys Need some help, i recently damaged my Apple Mac mainboard, the HDD is working,i need to read and copy the files from the. Summary: MacDisk, utility to manage Macintosh floppy disks, CD-ROMs, USB drives and all magnetic media on a PC without any add-on. Current version: 8.0, running under Windows 2000, XP, Vista and Windows 7/8/10 (even 64 bit). How to read Mac OS HFS drives in Windows for free. How to install and use the free HFSExplorer to access HFS drives in Windows 7. Download HFSExplorer 0.21. Make sure you download the Windows.

I bought a new external HDD for my mac about a month ago and formatted it to Mac OS X Extended Journaled. Now it has my all data. But the problem is I can’t access this HDD from my PC which has Windows and Linux.

The trouble is that the drive is already formatted—this limits options, but it’s neither expensive nor impossible to proceed. Paragon is a long-time developer of cross-platform Mac/Windows disk mounting software, and its HFS+ for Windows 10 works on Windows releases all the way back to XP and Windows Server 2003 all the way through the present Windows 10 release. It’s $20, but also has a 10-day trial. HFSExplorer for Windows is free and updated for Windows 10, but requires the installation of the Java 5 or later runtime environment (JRE), which can introduce security issues unless you configure it carefully.

For Ubuntu users and those with Unix or Linux distributions that can support hfsprogs, you can turn to a detailed thread at Ask Ubuntu for advice on mounting in read-only mode or, with some additional effort, as read/write.

If you’re starting from scratch, you can initialize a drive as MS-DOS (FAT)—better known as FAT32—which is readable up to Windows XP with the Master Boot Record scheme. Or, as long as you’re using Windows 7 or later with a 64-bit PC, you can pick both ExFAT, a replacement that handles much larger files (4GB and larger), and GUID Partition Map. A drive formatted in this fashion can be swapped between a Mac and Windows PC.

However, you might choose instead a format you can use easily with OS X, Windows, and Linux. Topher Kessler wrote in Macworld in December 2014 about using FUSE to extend which formats a Mac can read and write, including the common Linux format ext3.

While ext3 can’t be mounted directly in Windows, you can turn to the free Ext2Fsd Project, which isn’t yet compatible with Windows 10 at this writing. It’s also an unsupported project—there’s no one to complain to about crashes or data failures. For supported software, Paragon’s ExtFS for Windows Professional ($20, works up through Windows 10) will do the trick.

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Even though OS X can read Windows formatted hard drives just fine, the opposite is still not true, even with Windows 10. Granted, OS X can’t write to a Windows formatted disk, but at least it can read the contents of the drive and you can copy the data to your Mac computer.

Windows has absolutely no support for the Mac hard disk file format (HFS+). This means that if you connect a Mac formatted drive to Windows, you’ll simply get a blank drive letter and a message asking to format the disk.

If you click Cancel, you’ll just get a message stating that the volume does not contain a recognized file system.

I’ve already written about how, if your external USB drive is not recognized by Windows, you might have to use the exFAT file format, which both Windows and Mac support, however, this requires formatting the drive and copying all the data back on.

Another solution is to enable file sharing on your Mac and access files from Windows that way, but this requires a decent amount of setup. So are there any other options? Well, thankfully yes. If you use Macs and PCs heavily in your setup, it might be worth spending some money on a program called MacDrive. Mobi reader mac.

MacDrive

Mac Drive Reader For Windows

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.

You can then disconnect the drive from Windows, plug it into your Mac and access everything normally. If you find yourself having to copy data back and forth between Macs and PCs fairly often, this program is a great investment.

The Standard version is $49 and the Pro version is $69. You can see the difference between the two versions here. For me, the Standard version was more than enough. If you need to mount Mac formatted RAID sets on your PC or create ISO Mac images in Windows, then the Pro version will be necessary.

You can try out the program using the five-day free trial. Once you install it, you’ll have to restart your Windows PC. Once you log back into Windows, everything should automatically be good to go. If you connect a Mac formatted disk to your computer, it’ll instantly show up in Explorer with a little Apple icon on it.

If you double-click on the drive, it will open just like a normal Windows drive. If there is any file that is Mac-specific, it will also show an apple icon next to it.

Now you can copy data from the Mac formatted drive to your Windows PC and vice versa. It works perfectly and I didn’t run into a single issue. I was able to copy DMG files to my Windows PC and EXE files over to my Mac without any issue.

If you open the MacDrive app, you’ll see the main screen lists out the Mac drives the program has recognized already for you.

Click on the drive and you’ll get some options like opening the drive, removing it, getting a size breakdown and checking for errors.

I really like the fact that Disk Aware is part of this program because it allows you to quickly see what is taking up the most space on your hard drive, just like TreeSize does for Windows.

MacDrive also has other tools, which you can see across the top: Create, Repair, Burn, etc. Using Repair, you can connect a Mac drive to your Windows PC and fix it so that the data can be accessed. This is a great tool if you are a PC technician and someone brings you a Mac formatted hard drive that is corrupt or unreadable by OS X. You can use Mac Drive to try and repair it and access the data right on your PC.

Using the Create tab, you can create, delete or format partitions on a Mac disk. The Burn tab allows you to burn a CD/DVD for your Mac.

Mac Disk Reader For Windows

Overall, it’s an excellent program that is well worth the cost if you work with both operating systems on a regular basis. There is no other program out there that lets you access Mac files on a PC as easily and seamlessly as MacDrive. If you have any questions, feel free to comment. Enjoy!

In fact, some manufacturers sell “Mac” drives pre-formatted with this Mac-only file system.