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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.

114 replies

Dec 3, 2016 3:50 PM in response to Brian Kendig

On my computer, the Windows Anniversary upgrade process stopped at 71% with the error message "INACCESSIBLE_BOOT_DEVICE".


Today I discovered that the cause of the problem was the software program MacDrive Pro 10. The program's publisher, Mediafour, has an explanation here.


After I upgraded my copy of MacDrive Pro to the latest version (10.2.0, available here), I was able to upgrade to Windows Anniversary without any problems.


Using MacDrive Pro 10.2.0, I am able to read and write to the macOS Sierra partition of my hard drive from the Boot Camp partition. My computer is a 2013 iMac.

Dec 3, 2016 8:42 PM in response to Gaffable

Gaffable wrote:


Using MacDrive Pro 10.2.0, I am able to read and write to the macOS Sierra partition of my hard drive from the Boot Camp partition. My computer is a 2013 iMac.

This discussion is for the Apple-provided read-only drivers which allow Windows to read HFS+ partitions. Using third-party software is not the real issue.

Dec 13, 2016 3:28 PM in response to Loner T

I've just only realized it's not only a W10-1607 problem (not mounting HFS-partitions any longer) - Apple has also abandoned its HFS-support (Sierra-Bootcamp-6.1 isn't featuring any HFS-drivers anymore).


So there's only two alternatives left in my eyes: stick with W10-1511 (which is mounting HFS) plus El-Capitan-Bootcamp-6.0 (which still contains HFS-drivers) - or get accustomed to those behated clouds 🙂

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

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