

There are a few third-party products that allow Mac OS X to read NTFS formatted drives but as far as I'm aware the free ones aren't as well maintained as the commercial ones. Mac OS X has had support for reading NTFS formatted disk for a few versions, but still doesn't have write support. The default GUID partitioning scheme won't be recognised by 32-bit Windows XP and earlier Windows operating systems and Mac OS X versions earlier than 10.4. It also integrates with Windows Explorer.FAT32 (called MS-DOS (FAT) by Disk Utility a filesystem originally released in 1977 and updated a few times since, lastly in 1996) really is the only cross platform filesystem that is going to work fully out of the box with Windows and Mac OS X.īe careful though, if you are using Disk Utility to format the drive, you should make sure to choose the Master Boot Record partitioning scheme (hit the "Options." button below the "Partition Layout" control on the Partition pane). Like MacDrive, users can view, update, and delete files on the Mac hard drive.

A few of the popular applications used by Windows to read a Mac hard drive are listed below. Using a third-party application, it may be possible for a Windows computer to read a Mac-formatted hard drive. The HFS and HFS+ file systems are not readable by Windows.

For this reason, a Mac-formatted hard drive is not directly compatible, nor readable by a Windows computer.

Why not?Ī hard drive formatted for use in a Mac has either an HFS or HFS+ file system. File systems compatible with Windows include FAT32 and NTFS. For a Windows computer to be able to read a hard drive, it needs to have a file system format compatible with Windows.
