Hi, I've tried searching for a clear answer to this question so forgive me if I missed something obvious. Are Mac OS Journaled external hard drives readable by Windows XP machines without 3rd party software? When I currently plug in, it says the disk is unallocated and is not assigned a letter. Thanks
OS X Mountain Lion (10.8.2)
Windows can only read HFS+ with the help of software. Here http://www.pcadvisor.co.uk/how-to/windows/3369574/how-read-mac-os-hfs-drives-in- windows-for-free/ claims to be a free way to do it.
Allan
I'm not sure about the utility mentioned in that article, but I do recall that the BootCamp drivers had included a read-only driver to allow boot camp to read HFS/HFS+ formatted volumes. I imaging that you can also extract that driver from the Boot Camp Drivers installation package and install just it.
I personally had used MacDrive 8 for a year or so before I tried the Paragon driver. I was so impressed with the Paragon driver performance for me that I upgraded my muti-PC licenses (all 4 of them) to Paragon when they had an offer for a "competitive upgrade". Both Paragon and MacDrive have their issues, but the Paragon driver seemed much more seemlessly integrated into Windows and therefore worked more reliably for me.
HFS+ on Windows
