Making HFS+ volume available to Windows 8
June 3, 2013 7:43 PM Subscribe
What is the best way to access an HFS+ volume from a Windows 8 PC?
I need help determining the best way to make several GB of files on an OS X HFS+ volume available to a Windows 8 machine. The basics of the situation are as follows:
We have a wheezing G4 Mac running OS X 10.4. My wife has several years of files on this machine, mostly Adobe Photoshop and InDesign. Her new machine is a Dell running Windows 8. The switch from OS X to Windows was necessitated by the need to use specialized Windows software that the manufacturer could not guarantee would run properly under Boot Camp or Parallels. The Mac is currently running the File Sharing utility to allow files to be copied from it to the Windows 8 PC as needed. I'd like to shut down the Mac for reasons of space and power consumption, but still keep the files available.
As I see it, we have three leading contenders for the task:
1) Copy the OS X files to an external hard drive which would then be connected to the Windows 8 PC. This has the advantage of requiring no new software installed on the PC. I am not certain whether FAT32 or NTFS would be the best filesystem for the external drive, nor whether there would be any problems with copying the resource forks of the files to the external (non-HFS+) drive.
2) Remove the hard drive from the Mac, put it in an external drive enclosure, and connect it to the Windows 8 PC. I am in the very early stages of researching how to get Windows 8 to read an HFS+ volume. I'd be interested to know of any experiences anyone has had with this arrangement.
3) Remove the hard drive from the Mac, put it in an external drive enclosure, and connect it to an existing Ubuntu 12.04 server on our home network. I have no experience with this configuration either, and have no idea how well Linux and HFS+ get along. The chief disadvantage I see with this would be that file transfer would be limited by network throughput.
Note please that if we use an HFS+ volume, we don't need to write any files to that volume. The files from the Mac are needed only for archival reference. Anything that needs to be updated will be copied to the Documents folder on the PC.
Any and all thoughts on any of these options, or any options I haven't considered, will be most welcome.
I need help determining the best way to make several GB of files on an OS X HFS+ volume available to a Windows 8 machine. The basics of the situation are as follows:
We have a wheezing G4 Mac running OS X 10.4. My wife has several years of files on this machine, mostly Adobe Photoshop and InDesign. Her new machine is a Dell running Windows 8. The switch from OS X to Windows was necessitated by the need to use specialized Windows software that the manufacturer could not guarantee would run properly under Boot Camp or Parallels. The Mac is currently running the File Sharing utility to allow files to be copied from it to the Windows 8 PC as needed. I'd like to shut down the Mac for reasons of space and power consumption, but still keep the files available.
As I see it, we have three leading contenders for the task:
1) Copy the OS X files to an external hard drive which would then be connected to the Windows 8 PC. This has the advantage of requiring no new software installed on the PC. I am not certain whether FAT32 or NTFS would be the best filesystem for the external drive, nor whether there would be any problems with copying the resource forks of the files to the external (non-HFS+) drive.
2) Remove the hard drive from the Mac, put it in an external drive enclosure, and connect it to the Windows 8 PC. I am in the very early stages of researching how to get Windows 8 to read an HFS+ volume. I'd be interested to know of any experiences anyone has had with this arrangement.
3) Remove the hard drive from the Mac, put it in an external drive enclosure, and connect it to an existing Ubuntu 12.04 server on our home network. I have no experience with this configuration either, and have no idea how well Linux and HFS+ get along. The chief disadvantage I see with this would be that file transfer would be limited by network throughput.
Note please that if we use an HFS+ volume, we don't need to write any files to that volume. The files from the Mac are needed only for archival reference. Anything that needs to be updated will be copied to the Documents folder on the PC.
Any and all thoughts on any of these options, or any options I haven't considered, will be most welcome.
I see 2 good options taht don't require too much thinking:
get a cheap USB drive
500GB for $50 is a decent price. Plug it into the Mac. The drive is default formatted FAT32 so Macs and PCs will read it. copy files.
eject and plug drive into PC. ta dah!
OR
MacDrive is a simple option.
it's $50 but there is a free trial
posted by bobdow at 8:29 PM on June 3, 2013
get a cheap USB drive
500GB for $50 is a decent price. Plug it into the Mac. The drive is default formatted FAT32 so Macs and PCs will read it. copy files.
eject and plug drive into PC. ta dah!
OR
MacDrive is a simple option.
it's $50 but there is a free trial
posted by bobdow at 8:29 PM on June 3, 2013
If you're using File Sharing already, why not just copy the files onto the PC using that? It will take for-freaking-ever, but just kick it off and let it run overnight (or for a day, or two).
If it doesn't fit on your PC's drive, then I second bobdow: get an external drive and copy the files onto there (as FAT32). I wouldn't worry about any resource fork issues; you're unlikely to run into anything that cares about that.
Get a 1TB drive and then use that as your backup drive for the PC, too.
posted by overleaf at 9:57 PM on June 3, 2013
If it doesn't fit on your PC's drive, then I second bobdow: get an external drive and copy the files onto there (as FAT32). I wouldn't worry about any resource fork issues; you're unlikely to run into anything that cares about that.
Get a 1TB drive and then use that as your backup drive for the PC, too.
posted by overleaf at 9:57 PM on June 3, 2013
Windows by default can't read or write HFS+. MacDrive and Paragon are commercial products that will let you both read and write. They work reasonably well, but there are occasional reports of corruption, so either have backups or use them in read-only mode. There's also a read-only driver that Apple distributes for free as part of Boot Camp on Intel Macs, but it actually works on any Windows box—if you Google, you can probably find a copy.
Linux has a pretty good HFS+ driver, mostly read-only. Ubuntu comes with the driver enabled, as do most other Linux distros.
Neither FAT32 nor NTFS support all the features of HFS+, it's true. But neither do the HFS+ drivers above, I don't think MacDriver et al. support getting resource forks. Anyhow, platform-independent formats like Photoshop and InDesign should transfer over fine. Be aware that FAT32 has a maximum file size of 4 GB, in case you have any really huge files. Note also that OS X can't write NTFS out-of-the-box, you'll need to find/buy a driver.
In your position, I would probably just use File Sharing to grab all the interesting files off the Mac en masse, and be done with it.
PS: Regarding your "...need to use specialized Windows software that the manufacturer could not guarantee would run properly under Boot Camp." A Mac running Boot Camp is literally a perfectly normal Windows computer, which happens to have hardware manufactured by Apple. Unless your software is exceptionally specialized—as in, it comes with its own dedicated computer, or relies on unusual connectors like Fibre Channel—it'll work fine in Boot Camp.
posted by vasi at 11:23 PM on June 3, 2013 [1 favorite]
Linux has a pretty good HFS+ driver, mostly read-only. Ubuntu comes with the driver enabled, as do most other Linux distros.
Neither FAT32 nor NTFS support all the features of HFS+, it's true. But neither do the HFS+ drivers above, I don't think MacDriver et al. support getting resource forks. Anyhow, platform-independent formats like Photoshop and InDesign should transfer over fine. Be aware that FAT32 has a maximum file size of 4 GB, in case you have any really huge files. Note also that OS X can't write NTFS out-of-the-box, you'll need to find/buy a driver.
In your position, I would probably just use File Sharing to grab all the interesting files off the Mac en masse, and be done with it.
PS: Regarding your "...need to use specialized Windows software that the manufacturer could not guarantee would run properly under Boot Camp." A Mac running Boot Camp is literally a perfectly normal Windows computer, which happens to have hardware manufactured by Apple. Unless your software is exceptionally specialized—as in, it comes with its own dedicated computer, or relies on unusual connectors like Fibre Channel—it'll work fine in Boot Camp.
posted by vasi at 11:23 PM on June 3, 2013 [1 favorite]
Don't worry about losing the resource forks; they would be of no use to Windows software anyway. If you really, really care about them you could get IsoBuster and pay them the $40 they want for the HFS file recovery functionality, which can save Mac files along with their resource forks, either as separate files with related names, or as Alternate Data Streams on NTFS destination filesystems.
posted by flabdablet at 6:19 AM on June 4, 2013
posted by flabdablet at 6:19 AM on June 4, 2013
Re: resource forks, at least on current OSX versions they're stashed in the hidden .DS_Store directory when copied to non-HFS filesystems (like FAT32). You're unlikely to need them, but some things like certain font formats are mainly stored in the forks (as I discovered the hard way a little while ago).
If you're concerned about keeping these, just copying everything to a FAT32 external drive is probably your best bet, unless you have files over 4GB (unlikely on an old system). Copying over the network via SMB also ought to work. Everything else is no-go without special software on either the Mac or Windows end.
posted by neckro23 at 9:59 AM on June 4, 2013
If you're concerned about keeping these, just copying everything to a FAT32 external drive is probably your best bet, unless you have files over 4GB (unlikely on an old system). Copying over the network via SMB also ought to work. Everything else is no-go without special software on either the Mac or Windows end.
posted by neckro23 at 9:59 AM on June 4, 2013
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1. Plug the drive into an external enclosure of some sort.
2. Have enough space or another drive available.
3. Download FTK Imager 3.1.2
4. Create a disk image. This will create a full copy of your drive (every sector) (You might be able to select existing files only to add to the image, but not sure if that will work on Windows)
5. When the disk image is finished, open it with FTK imager.
The disk and partition layouts will look odd at first, but just dig down and you'll see all of your files. From there, you can export those files to the native filesystem of your choice.
posted by buck09 at 8:03 PM on June 3, 2013