If you dual-boot your Hackintosh, you've probably noticed that Windows can't read hard drive partitions used by Mac OS X. Mac OS X uses the HFS+ hard drive format, which Windows doesn't support. Luckily, you can enable HFS+ support on Windows with the help of one or two Windows drivers (depending on your budget). Read past the break for a tutorial on how to access your Hackintosh's Mac OS X hard drive partition from Windows.
Having read/write access for your Mac partition on Windows will come in handy if your Hackintosh becomes unbootable, because you'll be able to boot into Windows to recover your files (and possibly fix your Hackintosh's boot problem). On top of that, it's simply convenient.
LATEST UPDATE (January 26, 2013): Added Apple's Boot Camp Drivers to the article.
Paragon HFS+ ($20)
Paragon HFS+ ($20) is a Windows application that mounts all of your Mac hard drives in Windows Explorer (a.k.a. My Computer) and gives you read and write access. There's a 10-day trial available. Paragon HFS+ runs in the background and automatically starts on bootup, so accessing your Mac drives will feel exactly like accessing normal Windows drives.
Paragon is the same company that makes NTFS+ for Mac OS X, my recommended solution for enabling NTFS write support on Mac OS X Lion. If you're looking for an alternative to Paragon HFS+, then you can also consider MacDrive ($50; 5-day trial), which is the solution that I'm currently using on my own Hackintosh. It has a higher price tag and doesn't offer much more than Paragon HFS+, but it's an option. If purchasing apps is not an option for you, check out the following section.
Apple Boot Camp Drivers (Free)
Apple's Boot Camp software is designed to help you run Windows on real Macs. Among other things, Boot Camp includes built-in HFS+ drivers for Windows. These drivers will mount your Mac hard drives in Windows Explorer and give you read access (but no write access). If you don't need to write any files to your Mac hard drives, using them is a free and relatively pain-free solution.
While the HFS+ drivers are normally packaged as part of Apple's Boot Camp Assistant software, you can download them separately below.
DOWNLOAD: HFS Driver v.4.0.2.0
The above download is a ZIP file; open the file in Windows by double-clicking it. Once opened, double-click the 'Add_AppleHFS.reg' file. This will add the Boot Camp drivers to your Windows registry.
Next, open either the 'For 32-bit Windows' or 'For 64-bit Windows' folder, depending on your copy of Windows. (To find out whether your copy of Windows is 32-bit or 64-bit, click on the Start Menu, and then right-click on 'My Computer' and go to 'Properties'.) Inside these folders are two device driver files. Copy these two files to C:WindowsSystem32drivers. This will install the actual drivers into Windows; reboot your computer afterwards. Once Windows has restarted, your Mac hard drives will be mounted, and you will be able to read files from them properly.
NOTES:
SOURCE: Apple HFS+ Windows Driver (Download) [MacRumors]
Mar 25, 2017 I accidentally detected everything on my hard drive and recovery disk, and now my MacBook Air wouldn't boot from internet recovery mode. When I follow the proceedure comman-option-R the globe appears while waiting for the desired 15-20 minutes, afterwards a triangle with an exclamation sign appears in the globe. Mar 15, 2018 And, unlike HFSExplorer, it offers full read/write access to Mac-formatted drives, so you can write to them from within Windows. Just install it, and Mac drives will show up like any other drive. If you need to work with Mac-formatted drives on a regular basis and you want the operating system integration, speed, and write access, Paragon HFS+. Jul 10, 2017 If you’re lucky, you can just right-click each partition on the Mac drive and select Delete Volume to remove the partitions. You can then right-click in the empty space and select New Simple Volume to create a partition and format it with the Windows NTFS or FAT32 file systems. The Mac drive may have an “EFI System Partition” on it. When you plug a drive that's been formatted for Mac into a Windows PC, you may find that it isn't readable. This is because Mac uses the HFS+ format natively, whereas Windows uses ExFAT or NTFS. One simple way to make the drive readable on both platforms is to format it to ExFAT, which both operating systems can understand. This will erase all contents on the disk, however, so. How to access a Mac drive from a Windows or Linux system. 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.
Having read/write access for your Mac partition on Windows will come in handy if your Hackintosh becomes unbootable, because you'll be able to boot into Windows to recover your files (and possibly fix your Hackintosh's boot problem). On top of that, it's simply convenient.
LATEST UPDATE (January 26, 2013): Added Apple's Boot Camp Drivers to the article.
Paragon HFS+ ($20)
Paragon HFS+ ($20) is a Windows application that mounts all of your Mac hard drives in Windows Explorer (a.k.a. My Computer) and gives you read and write access. There's a 10-day trial available. Paragon HFS+ runs in the background and automatically starts on bootup, so accessing your Mac drives will feel exactly like accessing normal Windows drives.
Paragon is the same company that makes NTFS+ for Mac OS X, my recommended solution for enabling NTFS write support on Mac OS X Lion. If you're looking for an alternative to Paragon HFS+, then you can also consider MacDrive ($50; 5-day trial), which is the solution that I'm currently using on my own Hackintosh. It has a higher price tag and doesn't offer much more than Paragon HFS+, but it's an option. If purchasing apps is not an option for you, check out the following section.
Apple Boot Camp Drivers (Free)
Apple's Boot Camp software is designed to help you run Windows on real Macs. Among other things, Boot Camp includes built-in HFS+ drivers for Windows. These drivers will mount your Mac hard drives in Windows Explorer and give you read access (but no write access). If you don't need to write any files to your Mac hard drives, using them is a free and relatively pain-free solution.
While the HFS+ drivers are normally packaged as part of Apple's Boot Camp Assistant software, you can download them separately below.
DOWNLOAD: HFS Driver v.4.0.2.0
The above download is a ZIP file; open the file in Windows by double-clicking it. Once opened, double-click the 'Add_AppleHFS.reg' file. This will add the Boot Camp drivers to your Windows registry.
Next, open either the 'For 32-bit Windows' or 'For 64-bit Windows' folder, depending on your copy of Windows. (To find out whether your copy of Windows is 32-bit or 64-bit, click on the Start Menu, and then right-click on 'My Computer' and go to 'Properties'.) Inside these folders are two device driver files. Copy these two files to C:WindowsSystem32drivers. This will install the actual drivers into Windows; reboot your computer afterwards. Once Windows has restarted, your Mac hard drives will be mounted, and you will be able to read files from them properly.
NOTES:
- This method has only been confirmed to work with Windows 7 and Windows 8.
- You must uninstall Paragon HFS+ or MacDrive from your computer before installing Apple's HFS+ drivers.
- To uninstall Apple's HFS+ drivers, delete the two driver files from C:WindowsSystem32drivers. Restart your computer. Then, double-click on the 'Remove_AppleHFS.reg' file to remove the drivers from your Windows registry.
Erasing Mac Os Hard Drive
SOURCE: Apple HFS+ Windows Driver (Download) [MacRumors]
HFS+ is one of the primary file systems of macOS. If you work on Windows computer and need to read or write files from HDD, SSD or flash drive formatted under macOS, you need HFS+ for Windows by Paragon Software.
Stable Operation
Fail-safe operability across compatible hardware and software systems for both general-purpose and specialized applications
Data Safety
Protection of data integrity and prevention of accidental data corruption and possible loss
Guaranteed Performance
Steady throughput and balanced goodput with effective flow control, reduced overheads, and congestion avoidance
Efficient Use
Thrifty usage of processor, memory, and disk resources
Native look and feel
PC Advisor MagazineIt simply works out of the box too – previously inaccessible drives suddenly show up like any other, and you can now easily transfer data to and from a Mac using an external HFS+ formatted drive as an intermediary. There’s no performance penalty either – we happily transferred multi-gigabyte files via a USB 2 connection at around 40MB/s, for example.
pcadvisor.co.uk
MacBreaker,Paragon HFS+ runs in the background and automatically starts on bootup, so accessing your Mac drives will feel exactly like accessing normal Windows drives.
macbreaker.com
MakeUseOf,Paragon HFS+ does cost $20, but it also offers a 10-day free trial. If you just need to recover files from a drive, 10 days is plenty of time to install this file system driver, copy your files over, and uninstall it. If you want to use Mac drives on Windows on an ongoing basis, paying $20 so you can use the drive properly is a pretty good deal. As a bonus, Paragon HFS+ doesn’t require you have the insecure Java installed.
makeuseof.com
How it Works
Install
Download and install the HFS+ for Windows by Paragon Software
Use
Your drive will show up in Explorer
- Straightforward UI for working with HFS+ partitions as easily as native volumes
- Easy to navigate all features from a single application menu
- Check the integrity of HFS+ partitions to fix errors and view status report
- Quickly access HFS + partitions from the Windows taskbar
Features
Supported Operating Systems |
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Supported File Systems |
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Write Access | When a volume is mounted in write mode, you can do everything with files and folders it contains: read, edit, delete, rename, create new. |
Automount | HFS+ for Windows by Paragon Software mounts supported volumes automatically at startup, so you don’t need to bother about it each time you restart the operating system or power your computer on. However, this feature can be disabled at any moment in the program interface. |
Internationalization | HFS+ for Windows by Paragon Software supports all alphabets supported by your operating systems, including those that use non-Roman and non-Latin characters, so you will never face a problem of not getting access to file names on volumes mounted in non-native OS. |
Support for journaling | HFS+ for Windows by Paragon Software supports native HFS+ journaling, thus ensuring that in case of any failure the disk file system is not irreversibly corrupted and can be put back on track easily. |
Compatible with Apple Boot Camp | HFS+ for Windows by Paragon Software is fully compatible with Apple Boot Camp software and provides direct read and write access to Mac partitions from Windows installed on a Boot Camp. |
Compatible with 3rd party software | HFS+ for Windows by Paragon Software is compatible with popular virtualization and encryption applications including VMware Fusion and Workstation, Parallels Desktop, TrueCrypt and its forks. |
Need APFS support for Windows 10?
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GET APFS FOR WINDOWS NOW!
- Full support of Windows 10, 8/8.1, 7 SP1
- Availability to read and write data on APFS-formatted disks
- Automount
Frequently Asked Questions
Due to the specifics of Windows 8 or Windows 10 Fast Startup feature, we highly recommend that you disable it before installing the driver to avoid possible file system corruption. For more details, please refer to the Microsoft Knowledge Base ››
Can I try the product for free before buying? | |
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What versions of the HFS file system are supported? | |
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Is APFS supported? | |
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Is BootCamp supported? | |
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Is Core Storage supported? | |
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How many times can I re-activate my license? | |
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It doesn’t work! My HFS+ drive is not recognized in Windows, even after installing HFS+ for Windows by Paragon Software | |
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The product doesn’t run on Windows Server 2012 R2. | |
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Can I open my Time Machine backup using HFS+ for Windows? | |
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I frequently work with NTFS, HFS+, APFS-formatted partitions on my Mac and Windows PC. Can I get a discount, if I buy all drivers at once? | |
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Ensure multi-platform access - activate required file system drivers based on your IT park, regardless of OS, in any proportion.
Resources
Current Version | Download Paragon HFS+ for Windows by Paragon Software |
Product Documentation | Download Paragon HFS+ for Windows by Paragon Software User Manual |
Product Tour | View Product Tour |
Need help? | Contact Support or file a support ticket |
Paragon Technology Center
Want to learn more about the technology behind Microsoft NTFS for Mac by Paragon Software? Check out the Paragon Technology Portal!