Access Mac drives from Windows

by Joey Celis Jul 17th 2008

Reading and writing to a Mac formatted drive from Windows couldn't be any easier than selecting the samba file sharing option in Leopard. This works great if you have 2 physical computers but what if you only have a Mac running Boot Camp? Since Leopard isn't running getting to that document on the Mac partition from Windows would be difficult unless you installed MacDrive.

Once installed, Windows Explorer is able to mount the Mac drives right along side your standard Windows formatted drives. You are free to access them like any other drive.

If you're worried that you may accidentally delete files off your Mac partition just tick the option to mount the drives in "read only" mode, thus preventing any accidents. MacDrive's options can be access by double clicking it's icon in the system tray. But once you have tailored it to your work flow you'll rarely have a need to access the options.

In our testing we found no noticeable performance drops while accessing standard office documents and music files. And even if there were any drops in performance, the benefit of being able to access files created on the Mac partition from within Windows more than makes up for it.

So if you have your Mac set to dual boot you may want to consider MacDrive in order to swap your documents back and forth.

Tags: harddrive, os x, OsX, utilities, vista, windows, xp

Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

Jash Sayani said 12:24PM on 7-17-2008

Its a really good one and affordable too! using it from 1 year now....

Aron T said 12:29PM on 7-17-2008

This is a solid option, but unfortunately costs $49.95 for a single user.

I prefer to do this on the OS X side and use MacFUSE and install NTFS-3G. This allows you to read/write NTFS drives in OSX; it is free and works swimmingly!

Martin-T said 9:46AM on 7-18-2008

HFSExplorer reads the mac side and imports files from the Mac partition. Works great and it is released under General Public License (GPL).

Just one note: In Vista, Install by saving to the desktop, then right click on the install file and run with Admin privilidges.

http://hem.bredband.net/catacombae/hfsx.html

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