To use HFS Explorer, connect your Mac-formatted drive to your PC and go to File Load File System From Device. The software will automatically locate and load the connected drive for you. You’ll then begin seeing the contents of the HFS+ drive in a new graphical window. To copy any folders of file, select them and click the Extract button.

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. 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.

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:

Go to disk management again

Select the Mac disk from the list of drives – It shows Not initialized message in the empty disk.

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

The drive is now formatted and ready to use in Windows Operating System.

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

Format Mac Hard Drive On Windows 10

• It 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.

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  pcadvisor.co.uk

• 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,
  macbreaker.com

• 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,
  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

Windows Software To Read Mac Formatted Driver

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• 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 ››

Ensure multi-platform access - activate required file system drivers based on your IT park, regardless of OS, in any proportion.

Resources

Mac Formatted Drive On Pc

Format Mac Hdd On Windows

Paragon Technology Center

Read Mac Hard Drive Windows

Want to learn more about the technology behind Microsoft NTFS for Mac by Paragon Software? Check out the Paragon Technology Portal!