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Snow Leopard's Boot Camp Includes HFS+ Windows Drivers

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Apr 12, 2001
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MacRumors has learned that Apple's Boot Camp utility under Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard will include Windows HFS+ drivers, which will allow Windows installations to read Mac OS X HFS+ formatted partitions.

Boot Camp is Apple's software package that allows customers to boot Microsoft's Windows operating system on their Intel Macs. The Boot Camp package includes the necessary Windows drivers to support each Mac's hardware. Windows, however, does not routinely recognize Mac formatted hard drives and is unable to read or write to them without special drivers. The newest version of Snow Leopard's Boot Camp appears to include these special drivers to allow read access to Mac data even under Windows.

The move should make it easier for customers to switch between Windows and Mac operating systems by allowing files to be more easily transfered back and forth. Up until now, customers would have to rely on third-party utilities such as Mediafour's MacDrive to accomplish the same task.

Article Link: Snow Leopard's Boot Camp Includes HFS+ Windows Drivers
 
Article Link
https://www.macrumors.com/2009/05/06/snow-leopards-boot-camp-includes-hfs-windows-drivers/
Ya, this seems like a very easy way to have mac files become infected with virii. Sure, they wont do anything on the mac side, but if you want to transfer your files to a PC user...
 
Now this to me is an amazing feature. That's one thing that I disliked about using a Mac partitioned Hard Drive on a Windows installation.

But what about ZFS?
 
Wonder whether this will also go on general release on t'Internet? Maybe we can finally get rid of FAT32 as the lowest common denominator. Might also encourage M$ to be more open on NTFS, or risk losing out to the competition.
 
Hope this is included in the final shipped version of Snow Leopard. Have been using HFS Explorer to tide me over. It does the job but its not really the best of solutions.

Didn't want to go down the MacDrive route because it wasn't free and wasn't sure how much I would use it.
 
read-only would be nice, otherwise there is the risk of virii getting to the Mac files
 
Nice, Apple.

The next thing on the list is to be able to write to NTFS-formatted drives. But I suppose Microsoft needs to have a hand in that. *sigh*
 
Mavimao said:
So doe this mean that PC viruses can infect Mac partitions more easier?
Click to expand...

Yes. It means that problems with the PC can now easily spill over onto your Mac.

What I would recommend is NOT giving Windows access to the entire disk. Make a partition with just the data that needs to be shared. For example maybe just your iTunes library. But certainly not the applications or system folders
 
Awesome!! i hope it is full read/write support. I really hope they add full read/write support for NTFS on the mac too.
 
revs said:
read-only would be nice, otherwise there is the risk of virii getting to the Mac files
Click to expand...

my thoughts exactly. let's keep it read-only.

Ade-iMac-177 said:
Awesome!! i hope it is full read/write support. I really hope they add full read/write support for NTFS on the mac too.
Click to expand...

negative on write support. See above posts regarding viruses.

NTFS support would require a Microsoft license, so that's probably not going to happen.
 
so now under leopard, if i want to read and write a windows format harddisc? what are the workarounds?
 
I've got high hopes that Time Machine will finally be able to backup the Windows Partition. At least it would be nice to have it all done by one system.
 
ChrisA said:
Yes. It means that problems with the PC can now easily spill over onto your Mac.

What I would recommend is NOT giving Windows access to the entire disk. Make a partition with just the data that needs to be shared. For example maybe just your iTunes library. But certainly not the applications or system folders
Click to expand...

You're incorrect here... viruses could only propagate if there was full read/write support.
 
It would be nice if you can control the read or write behavior. So you can set up 1 disk as RW, and the rest as RO.

But having fined grained controls like that is not apple's style from what I've gathered over the years.

Even still it's a definite bonus, i was actually planning on purchasing a MacDrive license.. think I'll wait now.
 
Now how about fixing the multi touch trackpad drivers so that it doesn't keep blue screening and crashing out web browsers on a site using Flash. :(
 
All very good, but is there anyway to use the media keys whilst running windows? Which may include running the full 64bit?
 
Yippie! This will be nice having access to the HFS+ volume while in Vista.

Now if they'll just virtualize Vista in a window under OSX that would be even sweeter. :D
 
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