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Windows 10 Anniversary + Boot Camp = no longer mounting Mac partition

I have a Retina MacBook Pro (Late 2013) with Mac OS El Capitan, dual-booting with Windows 10 with Boot Camp installed. Everything was working fine until I installed the Windows 10 Anniversary Update today; now Windows no longer mounts the Mac partition. I successfully reinstalled the latest Boot Camp drivers, but Windows still won't show me the Mac partition. (Booting into Mac OS works fine.)


Is anyone else seeing this problem? Anyone know of a solution or workaround?

Posted on Aug 3, 2016 6:12 PM

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Posted on Jan 12, 2017 5:27 AM

Apple HFS+ drivers themselves work fine after updating to the 1607 (anniversary update). They just have problems mounting the drives. You have to devise some method for mounting them manually. I can suggest two options;


Option#1, by using ext2fsd software;

-Install 6.0 drivers just like before anniversary update, reboot the windows. Nothing will show up...

-Download ext2fsd even though you probably have nothing to do with ext2 or linux.

-Open Ext2 Volume Manager. In "File System" tab, your macOS partition will show as "HFS". If you installed ext2fsd before succesfully installing bootcamp drivers, it will just show as "RAW". (kind of proving bootcamp drivers DO work)

-Right click, select assign drive letter (or change drive letter).

-In the pop-up menu, select the drive letter first, then select the tick "Create a permanent MountPoint via Session Manager." It -weirdly- closes the pop-up before you click "OK". (Ext2fsd is a little buggy, you should select drive letter first, then select the tickbox. If you want to change drive letter, I suggest removing the existing one first, then re-add it from scratch)

-Reboot, and the macOS partition will be there just like before anniversary update. (On one of my computers, it didn't show on first reboot, I've gone into ext2 volume manager, redid everything then rebooted, it showed on second time.)

Option#2, mounting via Dos Devices registry edit (ext2fsd does exactly this, this is the manual way without using ext2fsd);

Run regedit, navigate to:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE/system/CurrentControlSet/Control/Session Manager/DOS Devices/

Right click-> new-> add string.


Enter drive letter you want by adding ":" to the end. In "data", type "\Device\HarddiskVolume#" where # will be your volume number of your partition as it would be detected in MS-DOS. I am sure someone would suggest a more elegant solution for this one, but you can simply navigate to Control Panel/Administrative Tools/Computer Management/Storage/Disk Management and count your partitions from beginning starting with 1. In my example, I have 1 partition on disk0, and my macOS partition is 2nd one in disk1. So my volume number # is 3.


In my registry it is "G:", "REG_SZ" and "\Device\HarddiskVolume3" for name, type, and data respectively. Your letter and numbers will be different, of course.


After making the registry tweak, cross fingers and reboot, macOS partition should be there. If something else is mounted instead, check volume number.


You can -probably- do trial and error on volume number, as long as you don't put a drive letter that contradicts with anything you already have (If you accidentally put your windows volume with a different drive letter, it will just mount it twice, nothing bad will happen. If you put different volume onto same drive letter you risk breaking your boot.)

Also one user in the first forum I've posted this workaround has installed ext2fsd, mounted his macOS partition, navigated to registry, noted the letter and volume number, then uninstalled ext2fsd, and re-added the registry entry with the same letter/volume number.

Hope this helps.

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Aug 4, 2016 2:07 AM in response to Brian Kendig

Same problem, earlier onset (I'm signed up to get release preview builds). Was really hoping MS was going to patch this before the wide release, but no such luck.


The latest build of HFSExplorer (http://www.catacombae.org/) works a charm for mounting, mapping, and extracting data from the HFS partition, so long as it is "Run in Administrator Mode". But as a software tool, it is somewhat inelegant compared to native access though File Explorer. Here's hoping this feature can be restored before long.

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Aug 4, 2016 7:37 AM in response to Brian Kendig

The W10 and W10 Anniversary Update breaks the JHFS+ driver loading in Windows. W7 and W8.1 do not have these issues. I have also checked that 6.0.6136 JHFS+ packages are signed, but they will not load. I need to look in Event Viewer to see what is causing issues.


If you have a business-crtitical system, I suggest staying away from the bleeding edge Windows updates otherwise you will hemorrhage. 😉

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Aug 4, 2016 7:36 AM in response to Loner T

"The W10 and W10 Anniversary Update breaks the JHFS+ driver loading in Windows" - thank you, that sounds like it. Do you know of any other discussions about this problem (on the Microsoft forums, perhaps)? I haven't been able to find any other mention of this, but it sounds like you know what you're talking about.


Interestingly enough, I also have a Hackintosh with separate Mac OS and Windows 10 drives, and Windows 10 Anniversary Edition has the Paragon HFS+ driver installed but is no longer mounting the Mac drive. I wonder if this is related? And I also wonder whether the other problems people are reporting, with partitions disappearing under Windows 10, could also be related?

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Aug 4, 2016 8:32 AM in response to Brian Kendig

Paragon HFS+ should be checked for driver signatures. You may also want to check for events in Event Viewer.


My original tests are W7-to-W10 and W8.1-to-W10 and then Apple Software Update. Both the AppleHFS.sys and AppleMNT.sys are at 6.x versions.


I am going to try a clean install of W10 and check these again. I am staying away from the Anniversary Update.

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Aug 4, 2016 10:34 PM in response to Prof Z10

Apple can deploy drivers through Apple Software Update, as they did in April 2016 when the AMD FirePro GL D700 drivers were updated from 15.201 to 15.301, before they reverted back to 15.200:

User uploaded file

...but they almost certainly will not do that for file system drivers; i.e., a new package needs to be downloaded in Boot Camp Assistant in Mac OS (Applications > Utilities). The Apple HFS and Apple Mount Manager drivers are still v.6.0.1.0 and 6.0.0.0, respectively, as of today which is the same as on 23 July 2016 and both drivers still have digital sigs from 12 August 2015. The BootCamp.msi is also still v.6.0.6136 on both dates and has the same hash. Will re-post if and when that changes... hopefully I'll hear of an MS patch at work before Apple has to do anything.

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Aug 5, 2016 7:01 AM in response to Brian Kendig

I have clean installed W10 using the latest Win10_1607_English_x64.iso. There are no functional HFS drivers. I will run

Win10_1511_English_x64.iso (both the _1 and _2 versions) and test. Next test is replacing these two files from a 5.1.5621 (for my specific model - 2012 13-in MBP) distribution and testing. I also have an older BC package 6.0.6133 to be tested.


This is a W10 problem based on testing so far. Diskpart reports the partition but no volume is created/reported. The BIOS installations have the correct MBR. Either volume discovery is broken or the drivers do not support the latest builds.

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Aug 5, 2016 3:13 PM in response to Brian Kendig

I don't know what method is used by the software to read the HFS partition within Windows, but the tool being open source I presume someone familiar with code would be able to deduce. It was just very reassuring for me to find that read-only access to the partition was at least possible in Windows 10 Anniversary, ruling out corruption of the Mac partition or the master boot record.

Brian Kendig wrote:


Thank you for recommending that, but right now I'm more interested in getting the previous functionality back as it was!

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Windows 10 Anniversary + Boot Camp = no longer mounting Mac partition

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