Use Macdrive [upd] — How To
MacDrive works on a simple principle: You don’t need to do anything special. Windows natively uses NTFS or exFAT; MacDrive adds the missing puzzle piece: HFS+ (the old Mac format) and APFS (the new Mac format, from High Sierra onward). From that moment, my PC treated the Mac drive like a native Windows drive. Chapter 3: The Disaster (When Read-Only Isn't Enough) A week later, disaster struck. I was on a deadline. My MacBook Pro’s screen died (logic board failure). On that Mac’s internal SSD was the final draft of a client video. I pulled the SSD out, put it in a USB enclosure, and plugged it into my PC.
I had MacDrive in "read-only" mode (the default for safety). I needed write access. I right-clicked the MacDrive icon in my system tray (the little purple circle near the clock) and selected "MacDrive Settings." how to use macdrive
Pro tip from my story: Before rebooting, I unplugged all my Mac-formatted drives. Windows gets confused if it sees an "unreadable" drive during installation. After the reboot, I plugged my drive back in. And there it was: in File Explorer, my Mac drive appeared like any other, with a small purple MacDrive icon next to it. I nearly cried. I double-clicked the drive. Inside were my folders: Movies , Music , Time Machine Backups . I clicked a .mov file. It opened instantly. I copied a Photoshop file from the Mac drive to my Windows desktop. Done. MacDrive works on a simple principle: You don’t
I could see the files. But when I tried to delete an old cache folder to make space for new exports? I tried to save a new file directly to the Mac desktop? Access Denied. Chapter 3: The Disaster (When Read-Only Isn't Enough)