MacDrive

[clayj]

http://www.mediafour.com/products/macdrive6/

Hey, does anyone have any experience with this product? Apparently, it gives Windows the ability to access OS X (HFS) partitions, so if you dual-boot OS X and Windows, your Windows apps can still access data (music, documents, etc.) on your OS X partition. The Genius at the Apple Store here just mentioned it to me and it looks like it might be pretty useful...

 

[balamw]

I haven't tried it myself, but I'm surprised this is the first you've heard of it since it comes up a lot in Boot Camp discussions... (The latest version works w/BC GPT drives).

Search the forums, and you will find....

B

 

[ITASOR]

I have my external HD's formatted as HFS+ because I constantly use them on my Macs. When I do use them on my PC, I use MacDrive and it works great! My PC has a 8x dual layer DVD burner, so I'm always transferring stuff to it via external HD to burn. It adds some cool functions to the right click in Windows too...like "burn with MacDrive" if I remember correctly. It's definitely a great piece of software in my books though.

 

[solvs]

I use it all the time. Much better than having everything in FAT32 and not being able to use over 4GB file sizes or NTFS and only being able to read. Of course, most of the time I just network everything, but it still comes in handy.

 

[yankeefan24]

I used it (demo) in boot camp a while back, and it worked alright, but if you shutdown, it would say something like the drive "LaCie Disk" or "Macintosh HD" was not properly ejected…

 

[Mojo67821]

I like it, but it's definitely buggy... IMO. They just released an update which fixed some of the problems, but I've gotten a blue screen or two while using it.

 

[jgandrade11]

MacDrive

I would reccommend MacDrive to anyone! This is one of my top 10 applications for the time being. It is true that they had some bug a few months back, but now it is a GREAT software to have in your mac running bootcamp, and its nice deal for the price u pay - this is just my experience and I am in NO way realed to this company, I'm just shairng my two cents.
So I would highly recommend this software.

Cheers

 

[Milanista]

But can we access windows files from Mac?

 

[Abulia]

But can we access windows files from Mac?

No, not unless you use FAT. NTFS is proprietary.

[Edit]Sorry, should have been clearer. You can READ NTFS from OS X, but not write. With FAT you can both read AND write from OS X to a Windows partition.

 

[solvs]

But can we access windows files from Mac?

You can read NTFS without any extra software, but not write to it.

 

[mkrishnan]

No, not unless you use FAT. NTFS is proprietary.

Does anyone know if MacDrive was reverse engineered, or made using readily available data about MacHFS+? If the former, I'm kind of surprised that, after all this time, no one has reverse engineered NTFS in such a way as to make a WinDrive... But at this point in NTFS' livespan, I guess WinFS will come out before we see this.

 

[Temujin]

Does anyone know if MacDrive was reverse engineered, or made using readily available data about MacHFS+? If the former, I'm kind of surprised that, after all this time, no one has reverse engineered NTFS in such a way as to make a WinDrive... But at this point in NTFS' livespan, I guess WinFS will come out before we see this.

The fact that there is no "WinDrive" might be because MS never released any info on the filesystem (as far as I'm informed that is). They kept it a company secret = monopoly!

 

[mkrishnan]

The fact that there is no "WinDrive" might be because MS never released any info on the filesystem (as far as I'm informed that is). They kept it a company secret = monopoly!

Yeah, I looked up the status on ntfs-linux and related projects, and it looks like they are still hacking away at writing to NTFS very slowly....

 

[balamw]

Yeah, I looked up the status on ntfs-linux and related projects, and it looks like they are still hacking away at writing to NTFS very slowly....

As I understood it, it's not for the lack of documentation, it's just the fact that NTFS is tied in so heavily with other Windows components like the registry that to implement NTFS you end up having to re-implement Windows. (a la WINE).

From the Wiki article on NTFS it sounds like limited writes are OK now with the built in NTFS drivers... Probably something like Captive NTFS the routine that uses the actual Windows DLLs could be implemented for the Intel Macs.

B

 

[ewinemiller]

I like it, but it's definitely buggy... IMO. They just released an update which fixed some of the problems, but I've gotten a blue screen or two while using it.

Let me second this and reiterate, it's buggy. I've been using it with bootcamp since bootcamp came out. I've had 3 complete wipes of the harddrive where MacDrive bluescreened and completely trashed the OSX drive. I had to reformat and start from scratch.

The blue screens have stopped for me since the last MacDrive update, but it still about once a week it locks up explorer and I have to shutdown by the power switch because the lockup is deep in MacDrive and explorer can't be killed. The result is always some corruption of the OSX partition.

It's very handy, but backup often.

 

[ManchesterTrix]

Does anyone know if MacDrive was reverse engineered, or made using readily available data about MacHFS+? If the former, I'm kind of surprised that, after all this time, no one has reverse engineered NTFS in such a way as to make a WinDrive... But at this point in NTFS' livespan, I guess WinFS will come out before we see this.

WinFS is not a replacement for NTFS. It's a data storage management system implemented on top of NTFS, not an actual file system. It would allow spotlight-like functionality in regards to metadata among other things.