- How To Read Mac Formatted Drive On Windows 10
- Read Mac Usb Drive Windows
- Macbook Pro Drivers Windows 10
- Read Linux Drive From Windows
- Mount Ext4 In Windows 10
First, back up the data on the Mac-formatted drive if you have anything important on it. This process won’t actually convert the file system. Instead, we’ll just be wiping the drive and starting over from scratch. Any files on the drive will be erased. If you have a Mac lying around, you can plug the drive into a Mac and back up the files.
Summary :
- It is a great application that can help you read a Mac formatted drive (Hard disks and disk images) on Windows 10. It has a clean and easy to use interface. It can help you read drives formatted with HFSX (MacOS Extended with file names that are case sensitive), HFS (MacOS Standard) and HFS+(macOS Extended) file systems.
- Jan 23, 2019 Windows cannot natively access a Mac formatted drive. Click the link below to download the 5 day free trial of a great utility MacDrive Install that, then restart your PC, Start the utility and connect the drive, you will then have access to that Mac drive like any other PC hard drive.
- You should open run (windows + R), and then type 'diskmgmt.msc'. If you can view your drive there, just simply assign a letter to drive by right clicking on the partition of your usb drive and assigning it a letter. Share a link to this answer.
If you connect a drive formatted in Mac to a Windows PC, you’ll be prompted to format it before use. That is to say, you are not allowed to view anything saved on it before formatting. But the question is: if you click Format disk, your data will be ruined. This post from MiniTool will introduce several useful ways to help you with that; please read carefully.
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Can You Read Mac Drive on Windows
Many people doubt that whether they can read Mac drive on Windows. Some took action: they removed the drive from Mac and connected it to a Windows PC properly. But after connecting the Mac-formatted drive to Windows, a prompt window will pop up automatically on the screen, saying that they need to format the disk before use.
Don’t Format the Drive
You should click Cancel instead of Format disk when seeing this prompt. Why? That is simply because the formatting action will damage your data saved on that drive. Is there any other way to read a Mac-formatted drive on Windows? Sure, it is; some effective ways used by other users will be shown to you later on this page.
What Does Formatting a Hard Drive Do
Some users said they clicked on the Format disk button by mistake when seeing the prompt window mentioned above; they were wondering if there’s any way to help them recover a formatted hard drive. Luckily, the answer is yes.
What does disk formatting mean?
Formatting a hard disk/drive refers to delete all the file & folders save on a drive and set a certain file system for it. The formatting action is performed to prepare a data storage device (including hard disk drive, solid-state drive, USB flash drive, and SD card) for initial use. Two of the most obvious results of formatting a hard disk are: deleting data and changing file system.
Besides, there are also other benefits of disk formatting:
- Get more space on disk.
- Solve disk problems caused by soft failure.
- Improve disk/system performance greatly.
- And so on.
Do you know how to improve Windows 10 performance effectively?
It’s necessary to improve Windows 10 performance effectively since various problems will occur inevitably on a system that has been used for a long time.
Recover Formatted Hard Drive
The first and the most important thing to do after formatting a hard drive is to recover precious data from hard drive. MiniTool Power Data Recovery can be a good data recovery assistant: it’s clean, safe, and professional. Please free download the trial edition to experience this data recovery tool first before you decide to buy it; after that, double click on the setup program to finish installing the software on your Windows computer, on which the Mac hard drives are formatted.
Follow this guide to recover data from Mac formatted external hard drives:
- Click Start now at the end of installation to launch MiniTool Power Data Recovery. You can also open it by double clicking on the software icon.
- Wait for a few seconds until the disk loading process is finished automatically.
- Select Hard Disk Drive from the pane on your left hand side.
- Choose the formatted Mac drive from the pane on your right hand side.
- Double click on the target drive directly or click on the Scan button at the bottom right corner.
- The full scan will be started at once; more and more files and folders will be found during the scan. Please make sure the Mac hard drive is always connected to your computer.
- Browse the found items carefully to decide which files are needed and which are not; add a checkmark into the square box in from of all the files you want to recover. If you can’t confirm, go to view the content before recovery by clicking Preview.
- Click on the Save button in the lower right corner.
- Select a storage path in the pop-up window to store the files waiting to be recovered; please make sure it has enough free space left. (You shouldn’t select the original Mac-formatted drive as the storage location in order to avoid secondary damage.)
- Click on the OK button in the same window to confirm your selection.
- Then, wait until all the files saved on Mac hard drive have been recovered successfully to appointed place. A prompt window will show up to inform you of the recovery result.
MiniTool Power Data Recovery is also a great tool for recovering formatted SD card or broken/corrupted USB stick. The recovery steps are basically the same expect that you should select Removable Disk Drive Microsoft office 2011 mac serial number keygen. from the left sidebar as mentioned in step 3.
After the data recovery process has been completed, you may transfer back the recovered files to the formatted disk as long as you can confirm that you’ve got back all the files you need.
Windows 10 Read Mac Drive
Can a Mac external drive be read on a PC?
A lot of people are wondering whether they can read Mac drive on Windows 10 with freeware. In fact, there is both free and paid software to help people read Mac drive on PC easily, without formatting the disk. I’ll introduce some of the useful software to you one by one in this part; please choose a proper hard drive reader yourself.
Note: Choice 1 ~ 3 is suitable for reading HFS & HFS+; choice 4 ~ 5 is used to read APFS on Windows.
Choice 1: HFSExplorer
HFSExplorer is completely free; it’s a basic application designed to help users read Mac-formatted hard disks and disk images. HFSExplorer gives support to various file systems: HFS (the Standard file system on Mac), HFS+ (the Extended file system on Mac OS), HFSX (the Extended Mac OS file system with case sensitive file names), etc.
What does HFSExplorer allow you to do?
- Browse volumes on Mac by using a graphical file system browser.
- Check the volume related information.
- Extract files you need (copy files to Windows hard disk free).
- Mount & read disk images like .dmg and .sparsebundle.
- Create disk images from the volume on Mac.
The partition schemes including Master Boot Record, GUID Partition Table, and Apple Partition Map are supported by HFSExplorer.
Attention!
You need to install Java first if you don’t have it on your PC since it’s required (Sun's Java SE runtime environment version 5.0 or greater in which OpenJDK works fine).
HFSExplorer: Launch error
No Java runtime environment found. HFSExplorer cannot function without Java.
Press “OK” to open up http://www.java.com where you can download a Java runtime environment for your system.
You should just click OK as prompted to download & install proper runtime environment when seeing the window above.
How to use HFSExplorer to read Mac hard drive on Windows:
- Connect the Mac-formatted external hard drive to the Windows computer properly.
- Launch HFSExplorer as administrator on your computer.
- Select File from the menu bar at the top of the opening window.
- Choose Load file system from device from the submenu (you can also press Ctrl + L directly).
- Click on the Autodetect button to automatically detects HFS/HFS+/HSFX partitions on your system (you can also Select a device or Specify device name manually).
- Pick out the files and folders you want to view and click Extract.
- Choose a folder as the destination place to store the items selected in the previous step (they’ll be copied immediately).
- Expand the target folder to read files on your Windows PC.
If the connected external hard drive is not showing up on PC, you can’t detect it in step 5. You must make it appear in Windows first.
Is there any other hard drive reader for Windows? Of course, yes; please move on.
Choice 2: Apple HFS+ Drivers
Another way to access HFS + files in Windows 10 for free is installing Apple HFS + drivers.
Tip: The Apple HFS + drivers only give you read access to the files in Mac-formatted drives.
Steps to read Mac drives on PC with Apple HFS + drivers:
First, you should make sure you don’t have Paragon or MacDrive (the hard drive readers I will talk about later) on your Windows computer. If you do, please remove them now.
Second, you should download the correct Windows driver package to your local drive.
Third, you should configure your Windows as follow.
- Go to the default download path (Downloads folder) to extract the downloaded zip file.
- Find AppleHFS.sys and AppleMNT.sys files.
- Copy them by pressing Ctrl + C (you can also do it by right clicking & choosing Copy).
- Go to this path: C:WindowsSystem32drivers.
- Copy them by pressing Ctrl + V (you can also right click on any blank area & choose Paste).
- Navigate to the downloaded folder to find Add_AppleHFS.reg file.
- Open the .reg file to bring up a Registry Editor prompt window.
- Click on the Yes button and then click OK.
- Restart your computer to make changes take effect.
Fourth, you should connect the Mac-formatted drive to your PC -> open File Explorer (also called Windows Explorer) -> locate that drive under This PC -> access files you want.
Tip: You may find the File Explorer has stopped working or not responding when trying to open it; please don’t be nervous since this problem can be fixed.
Choice 3: HFS+ for Windows
Though the Paragon HFS+ for Windows is a paid hard driver reader, you’ll love it after using.
What can Paragon HFS+ for Windows do for you?
- The speed is fast and the performance is stable.
- The Mac file systems are integrated into Windows File Explorer.
- It provides full read and write access to Mac drives formatted with HFS, HFS +, and HFSX (just like other drives in Windows).
- It allows Windows programs to read from or write to the Mac-formatted drive on Windows.
- There are additional features that worth the cost.
How much does it cost?
The Paragon HFS+ for Windows is sold on the official website for $19.95 with a single seat license; $49.95 with one license worked on 3 PCs.
If you don’t want to spend money in reading Mac drive on Windows, you should download the trial edition; it is free for use for 10 days. You can access, copy files from or to the Mac drive during this period; it’s enough.
Choice 4: MacDrive
If your Mac drive is formatted with APFS (Apple File System), you won’t be able to read Mac hard drive on Windows because there are no free apps designed for it. But you have many choices of paid applications to access & edit Mac drive files on Windows; MacDrive is a popular one designed by Mediafour.
Merits of MacDrive:
- It is used to help users read data from and write data to Mac disks from Windows directly.
- You can read both APFS and HFS+ drives in File Explorer.
- It allows you to create and partition Mac disks on your Windows.
- A graphical interface is offered for Mac-formatted drives verification, format, and repair.
- It’s a trusted solution which can date back to 1996.
The only drawback of MacDrive seems to be the selling price is higher than some similar tools. You need to pay $49.99 for the Standard version or $69.99 for the Pro version.
Is it worth the price? Yes, if you have such needs; it also includes unique features like support for Mac-formatted RAID disks.
Choice 5: Paragon APFS for Windows
Paragon also designed an APFS for Windows app for reading APFS Mac drive on Windows; it is considered as one of the main competitors of MacDrive.
Features of Paragon APFS for Windows:
- It provides read and write access to Mac drives formatted with APFS.
- It also allows you to access and edit compressed and cloned files (you can only access the encrypted volumes without making any changes).
- It gives support to auto-mounting at start-up; the partition tools of MacDrive are not included in this app.
The biggest disadvantage of Paragon APFS for Windows when compared to MacDrive is the HFS+ support. The biggest advantage of Paragon APFS for Windows over MacDrive is the price – it costs only $49.95 for one license worked on 3 PCs.
Of course, there are many other tools available for you to read Mac drives on Windows (10/8/7, etc.).
Bonus Tip
You can format your Mac hard drive to exFAT, which supports both Windows and Mac OS X. In this way, you can get full read and write access to exFAT drives on Windows without any additional third-party software.
The only thing you need to worry is that the data on Mac drives will be removed. So you need to turn to MiniTool Power Data Recovery as mentioned in part 1 to recover the files you need after formatting.
How to format a hard drive? Basically, there are three ways.
- Right click on the drive in File Explorer -> choose Format.
- Open Disk Management -> right click on the target drive -> choose Format.
- Format Partition with MiniTool Partition Wizard – a professional disk manager.
Final Thoughts
Though you can’t access a Mac-formatted drive on a Windows computer directly, there are useful ways and tools to help you read Mac drive on Windows easily. Please just follow the steps mentioned above and choose the tool depending on your needs.
The Hard Drives formatted for mac have an HFS+ file system. This file system is specifically for Mac systems and windows can’t read this file system. You can have access to the HFS + file system hard drive on windows with the help of any third party software. There are a number of tools that can help you in this regard. But using a third party all the time for accessing a hard drive on windows is not good. A user has to know how to convert Mac formatted hard drive to Windows formatted.
The Windows system uses a hard drive with a different file system than the Mac systems. Windows-formatted hard drives have either NTFS file system of an FAT32 file system. Thus in order to make the hard drive Windows formatted, you have to convert the file system to NTFS or FAT32. In the further discussion, you will learn how to make a hard drive useful for Windows by changing the formatting of the drive.
Get a Backup
Before going ahead and formatting your hard drive for Windows, you should get a backup. New desktop mac. Formatting of any kind can leave the hard drive totally empty by erasing all your data. There are a number of instances when users lose their important data due to formatting. It is very important to save the integrity of your data on the hard drive.
You can take help of any third party tool to make a backup of your hard drive. Or you may opt to make a normal backup in your external drive or another computer. Make sure you perform all the backup properly, an improper operation may leave the hard drive with error and hard drive may ask for formatting before use. However, data from formatted disk error in Windows can be recovered generally with any good tool.
Taking a proper backup is very important for your data before formatting your hard drive. Some of the most important things to take care of involve using a hard drive carefully during any kind of transfer, installation or formatting.
Delete the Mac Formatted Partition
The first step in this regard should be deleting the Mac partition with HFS + file system. In order to make it possible, you have to run the disk management tool. Here is how to do it:
Right-click on Windows icon, select Disk Management.
Select the Mac drive from the list of drives - Make sure this is the drive you want to work on, if you do it for the Windows formatted drive in the list, it may cost you a lot of important data.
Right Click on the partition and select Delete Volume – This will remove the partition.
Right click on the space and select New Simple Volume from the list.
Set the file system as NTFS or FAT 32 according to your need.
Delete EFI System Partition
Most of the times the mac drives are formatted with an EFI system partition. This is secure than the simple partition and you can’t right click and format the drive. To format such a partition, you have to go through a complete wipe out of your hard drive. If your Mac drive has an EFI partition, follow the steps to format it:
Go to device management window – As explained in the above section.
Locate your drive partition which has Mac format file system.
Note the disk number from the window
To go to command prompt – Type Run in Search Box on Taskbar and press Enter > Type cmd and press Enter
OR
Go to Windows > Type cmd and press Enter
Type diskpart in the command prompt window and press Enter
Type list disk in the diskpart window and press Enter
Find your disk with the disk number that you have seen initially
Type select disk <disk number> and press Enter
Type Clean and press Enter
This will clean your hard drive all the data will wipe out. Now in order to use this on Windows, you have to designate a file system to the hard drive partitions.
How To Read Mac Formatted Drive On Windows 10
![Formatted Formatted](https://image.dhgate.com/0x0s/f2-albu-g3-M00-6B-A9-rBVaHVZNfvWAOrSOAADAOBfKYiE090.jpg/epacket-ship-100-real-full-capacity-64gb.jpg)
Assign NTFS File System
Once you have wiped out the content of your disk along with file system that was stopping it from use by Windows. you can go ahead and give a file system to the partitions:
Read Mac Usb Drive Windows
Go to disk management again
Select the Mac disk from the list of drives – It shows Not initialized message in the empty disk.
Macbook Pro Drivers Windows 10
Right-click on the disk and select Initialize disk
Create a partition for your disk
Right click and select New Simple Volume
Set the file system as NTFS or FAT32 as per your requirement
Read Linux Drive From Windows
Mount Ext4 In Windows 10
The drive is now formatted and ready to use in Windows Operating System.