Use a USB cable or free USB port to attach the hard drive with the device. The external hard drive carries an indicator light that either blinks or stabilize when in sound connection with the device. For Mac devices, you would need a USB or thunderbolt 3 adapter.
Even though Mac computers are capable of reading hard drives that are formatted for Windows, if you intend on using your external HDD as a bootable disk or want to use it to backup files with your Mac’s Time Machine, you must format it to be entirely Mac compatible.
Summary :
Prepare the External Drive for Installing Windows. The external drive that you’ll install Windows on needs to be prepared by erasing and formatting the drive for use with Windows. Warning: The erase, format, and partitioning process will delete all data currently contained on the external drive. Ensure the external drive is connected to your Mac. The external hard drive is set partitioned for Mac and PC and ready for you to use. Your Mac shows all the partitions as separate drive icons on your desktop screen. And you can copy the files you want across. Not sure how to use an external hard drive? Take a look at my article on how to connect an external hard drive. Jump down to the section.
If you connect a drive formatted in Mac to a Windows PC, you’ll be prompted to format it before use. That is to say, you are not allowed to view anything saved on it before formatting. But the question is: if you click Format disk, your data will be ruined. This post from MiniTool will introduce several useful ways to help you with that; please read carefully.
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Can You Read Mac Drive on Windows
Many people doubt that whether they can read Mac drive on Windows. Some took action: they removed the drive from Mac and connected it to a Windows PC properly. But after connecting the Mac-formatted drive to Windows, a prompt window will pop up automatically on the screen, saying that they need to format the disk before use.
Don’t Format the Drive
You should click Cancel instead of Format disk when seeing this prompt. Why? That is simply because the formatting action will damage your data saved on that drive. Is there any other way to read a Mac-formatted drive on Windows? Sure, it is; some effective ways used by other users will be shown to you later on this page.
What Does Formatting a Hard Drive Do
Some users said they clicked on the Format disk button by mistake when seeing the prompt window mentioned above; they were wondering if there’s any way to help them recover a formatted hard drive. Luckily, the answer is yes.
What does disk formatting mean?
Formatting a hard disk/drive refers to delete all the file & folders save on a drive and set a certain file system for it. The formatting action is performed to prepare a data storage device (including hard disk drive, solid-state drive, USB flash drive, and SD card) for initial use. Two of the most obvious results of formatting a hard disk are: deleting data and changing file system.
Besides, there are also other benefits of disk formatting:
Get more space on disk.
Solve disk problems caused by soft failure.
Improve disk/system performance greatly.
And so on.
Do you know how to improve Windows 10 performance effectively?
It’s necessary to improve Windows 10 performance effectively since various problems will occur inevitably on a system that has been used for a long time.
Recover Formatted Hard Drive
The first and the most important thing to do after formatting a hard drive is to recover precious data from hard drive. MiniTool Power Data Recovery can be a good data recovery assistant: it’s clean, safe, and professional. Please free download the trial edition to experience this data recovery tool first before you decide to buy it; after that, double click on the setup program to finish installing the software on your Windows computer, on which the Mac hard drives are formatted.
Follow this guide to recover data from Mac formatted external hard drives:
Click Start now at the end of installation to launch MiniTool Power Data Recovery. You can also open it by double clicking on the software icon.
Wait for a few seconds until the disk loading process is finished automatically.
Select Hard Disk Drive from the pane on your left hand side.
Choose the formatted Mac drive from the pane on your right hand side.
Double click on the target drive directly or click on the Scan button at the bottom right corner.
The full scan will be started at once; more and more files and folders will be found during the scan. Please make sure the Mac hard drive is always connected to your computer.
Browse the found items carefully to decide which files are needed and which are not; add a checkmark into the square box in from of all the files you want to recover. If you can’t confirm, go to view the content before recovery by clicking Preview.
Click on the Save button in the lower right corner.
Select a storage path in the pop-up window to store the files waiting to be recovered; please make sure it has enough free space left. (You shouldn’t select the original Mac-formatted drive as the storage location in order to avoid secondary damage.)
Click on the OK button in the same window to confirm your selection.
Then, wait until all the files saved on Mac hard drive have been recovered successfully to appointed place. A prompt window will show up to inform you of the recovery result.
MiniTool Power Data Recovery is also a great tool for recovering formatted SD card or broken/corrupted USB stick. The recovery steps are basically the same expect that you should select Removable Disk Drive from the left sidebar as mentioned in step 3.
After the data recovery process has been completed, you may transfer back the recovered files to the formatted disk as long as you can confirm that you’ve got back all the files you need.
Windows 10 Read Mac Drive
Can a Mac external drive be read on a PC?
A lot of people are wondering whether they can read Mac drive on Windows 10 with freeware. In fact, there is both free and paid software to help people read Mac drive on PC easily, without formatting the disk. I’ll introduce some of the useful software to you one by one in this part; please choose a proper hard drive reader yourself.
Note: Choice 1 ~ 3 is suitable for reading HFS & HFS+; choice 4 ~ 5 is used to read APFS on Windows.
Choice 1: HFSExplorer
HFSExplorer is completely free; it’s a basic application designed to help users read Mac-formatted hard disks and disk images. HFSExplorer gives support to various file systems: HFS (the Standard file system on Mac), HFS+ (the Extended file system on Mac OS), HFSX (the Extended Mac OS file system with case sensitive file names), etc.
What does HFSExplorer allow you to do?
Browse volumes on Mac by using a graphical file system browser.
Check the volume related information.
Extract files you need (copy files to Windows hard disk free).
Mount & read disk images like .dmg and .sparsebundle.
Create disk images from the volume on Mac.
The partition schemes including Master Boot Record, GUID Partition Table, and Apple Partition Map are supported by HFSExplorer.
Attention!
You need to install Java first if you don’t have it on your PC since it’s required (Sun's Java SE runtime environment version 5.0 or greater in which OpenJDK works fine).
HFSExplorer: Launch error
No Java runtime environment found. HFSExplorer cannot function without Java.
Press “OK” to open up http://www.java.com where you can download a Java runtime environment for your system.
You should just click OK as prompted to download & install proper runtime environment when seeing the window above.
How to use HFSExplorer to read Mac hard drive on Windows:
Connect the Mac-formatted external hard drive to the Windows computer properly.
Launch HFSExplorer as administrator on your computer.
Select File from the menu bar at the top of the opening window.
Choose Load file system from device from the submenu (you can also press Ctrl + L directly).
Click on the Autodetect button to automatically detects HFS/HFS+/HSFX partitions on your system (you can also Select a device or Specify device name manually).
Pick out the files and folders you want to view and click Extract.
Choose a folder as the destination place to store the items selected in the previous step (they’ll be copied immediately).
Expand the target folder to read files on your Windows PC.
If the connected external hard drive is not showing up on PC, you can’t detect it in step 5. You must make it appear in Windows first.
Is there any other hard drive reader for Windows? Of course, yes; please move on.
Choice 2: Apple HFS+ Drivers
Another way to access HFS + files in Windows 10 for free is installing Apple HFS + drivers.
Tip: The Apple HFS + drivers only give you read access to the files in Mac-formatted drives.
Steps to read Mac drives on PC with Apple HFS + drivers:
First, you should make sure you don’t have Paragon or MacDrive (the hard drive readers I will talk about later) on your Windows computer. If you do, please remove them now.
Second, you should download the correct Windows driver package to your local drive.
Third, you should configure your Windows as follow.
Go to the default download path (Downloads folder) to extract the downloaded zip file.
Find AppleHFS.sys and AppleMNT.sys files.
Copy them by pressing Ctrl + C (you can also do it by right clicking & choosing Copy).
Go to this path: C:WindowsSystem32drivers.
Copy them by pressing Ctrl + V (you can also right click on any blank area & choose Paste).
Navigate to the downloaded folder to find Add_AppleHFS.reg file.
Open the .reg file to bring up a Registry Editor prompt window.
Click on the Yes button and then click OK.
Restart your computer to make changes take effect.
Fourth, you should connect the Mac-formatted drive to your PC -> open File Explorer (also called Windows Explorer) -> locate that drive under This PC -> access files you want.
Tip: You may find the File Explorer has stopped working or not responding when trying to open it; please don’t be nervous since this problem can be fixed.
Choice 3: HFS+ for Windows
Though the Paragon HFS+ for Windows is a paid hard driver reader, you’ll love it after using.
What can Paragon HFS+ for Windows do for you?
The speed is fast and the performance is stable.
The Mac file systems are integrated into Windows File Explorer.
It provides full read and write access to Mac drives formatted with HFS, HFS +, and HFSX (just like other drives in Windows).
It allows Windows programs to read from or write to the Mac-formatted drive on Windows.
There are additional features that worth the cost.
How much does it cost?
The Paragon HFS+ for Windows is sold on the official website for $19.95 with a single seat license; $49.95 with one license worked on 3 PCs.
If you don’t want to spend money in reading Mac drive on Windows, you should download the trial edition; it is free for use for 10 days. You can access, copy files from or to the Mac drive during this period; it’s enough.
Choice 4: MacDrive
If your Mac drive is formatted with APFS (Apple File System), you won’t be able to read Mac hard drive on Windows because there are no free apps designed for it. But you have many choices of paid applications to access & edit Mac drive files on Windows; MacDrive is a popular one designed by Mediafour.
Merits of MacDrive:
It is used to help users read data from and write data to Mac disks from Windows directly.
You can read both APFS and HFS+ drives in File Explorer.
It allows you to create and partition Mac disks on your Windows.
A graphical interface is offered for Mac-formatted drives verification, format, and repair.
It’s a trusted solution which can date back to 1996.
The only drawback of MacDrive seems to be the selling price is higher than some similar tools. You need to pay $49.99 for the Standard version or $69.99 for the Pro version.
Is it worth the price? Yes, if you have such needs; it also includes unique features like support for Mac-formatted RAID disks.
Choice 5: Paragon APFS for Windows
Paragon also designed an APFS for Windows app for reading APFS Mac drive on Windows; it is considered as one of the main competitors of MacDrive.
Features of Paragon APFS for Windows:
It provides read and write access to Mac drives formatted with APFS.
It also allows you to access and edit compressed and cloned files (you can only access the encrypted volumes without making any changes).
It gives support to auto-mounting at start-up; the partition tools of MacDrive are not included in this app.
The biggest disadvantage of Paragon APFS for Windows when compared to MacDrive is the HFS+ support. The biggest advantage of Paragon APFS for Windows over MacDrive is the price – it costs only $49.95 for one license worked on 3 PCs.
Of course, there are many other tools available for you to read Mac drives on Windows (10/8/7, etc.).
Bonus Tip
You can format your Mac hard drive to exFAT, which supports both Windows and Mac OS X. In this way, you can get full read and write access to exFAT drives on Windows without any additional third-party software.
The only thing you need to worry is that the data on Mac drives will be removed. So you need to turn to MiniTool Power Data Recovery as mentioned in part 1 to recover the files you need after formatting.
How to format a hard drive? Basically, there are three ways.
Right click on the drive in File Explorer -> choose Format.
OpenDisk Management -> right click on the target drive -> choose Format.
Format Partition with MiniTool Partition Wizard – a professional disk manager.
Final Thoughts
Though you can’t access a Mac-formatted drive on a Windows computer directly, there are useful ways and tools to help you read Mac drive on Windows easily. Please just follow the steps mentioned above and choose the tool depending on your needs.
By Adela D. Louie, Last updated: August 31, 2020
Having trouble with your iPhone device? Are you seeking an answer on how to backup iPhone to external hard drive windows? Well then, this post is for you.
iPhone devices come with a huge storage space that every user can enjoy using for them to store as much data as they want. However, even though it comes with a huge amount of storage space, you still have some limits on the data that you can store. And with that, the best way to keep our data is to transfer them over to an external hard drive since this can accommodate a larger amount of data.
But what if you have a Windows computer and have an iPhone device that you want to backup to your external hard drive? Would you still be able to do this? Well, the answer to that is, of course, you still can. And that is what we are going to show you in this article. A guide on how to backup iPhone to external hard drive Windows.
Part 1: Two Ways to Backup iPhone to External Hard Drive Windows
How do I backup my iPhone to an external hard drive without iTunes?Now when it comes to backing up your iPhone device to an external hard drive using your Windows computer, you will have to ensure two things first.
You have to make sure that your external hard drive is formatted to the Windows NT files system or known as the NTFS.
You also have to make sure that you have a new folder that is named “iPhone backup” that is in your external hard drive that you are going to use.
Way #1: Change the Location of your iPhone backup using the Command Prompt
The first thing that you will be needing to do is to make a symbolic link on your Windows computer into the external hard drive that you are going to use. And then, have your external hard drive connected to your Windows PC. And in case there is a link symlink that is made the error, then go ahead and fix it this way.
Step 1: Simply close your iTunes program and then launch the Command Prompt and run it as administrator on your Windows PC.
Step 2: After that, go ahead and key in the command below and then press the Enter button after.
Reminder: For your default iPhone backup location: C:UsersisunshareAppDataRoamingApple ComputerMobileSyncBackup
For new location of backup for your iPhone: H:iPhoneBackup
Step 3: And right after that, you will then be able to see a new folder with a name “Backup” that comes with an arrow in the location where your iPhone backup is.
Way #2: Use Your iTunes to Backup iPhone to External Hard Drive Windows
Here, all you have to do is to connect your iPhone device to your Windows PC and then launch your iTunes program. Once that your iPhone is detected by the iTunes, go ahead and click on the iPhone icon and choose the option Back Up Now. Then, then you have to wait to finish the process.
Also, you have to make sure that you do not cancel on the Mklink that is routing to your external hard drive with the command that we have indicated below and so your iTunes backup will be saved on your external hard drive.
Part 2: The Best Way to Backup iPhone to External Hard Drive Windows
Aside from the one that we have mentioned above, there is also another way on how you can backup iPhone to external hard drive Windows is by using a third-party application. And the app that you need is no other than the FoneDog iOS Data Backup and Restore.
iOS Data Backup and RestoreOne click to backup the whole iOS device to your computer.Allow to preview and restore any item from the backup to a device.Export what you want from the backup to your computer.No data loss on devices during the restore.iPhone Restore Won't Overwrite Your Data
The FoneDog iOS Data Backup and Restore is a one-click application that you can use for you to backup the data on your iPhone device, and at the same time, you can also restore them to another device such as your external hard drive. Through this tool, you can easily backup your contacts, photos, messages, videos, and so much more that are important on your iPhone device.
And to know how you can use this program, here is a quick tutorial that you can follow.
Method #1: How to Backup iPhone
Step 1: Simply Launch and Connect
After getting the FoneDog iOS Data Backup and Restore tool from the official website, you can then go ahead and run it on your Windows computer. And once that the program is up and running, you can now connect your iPhone to your Windows PC using your USB cable and wait for the tool to recognize your iPhone device.
Step 2: Select a Method
Then on the next page of the FoneDog iOS Data Backup and Restore, you can now go ahead and select a method that you want to do. Here, since that you want to backup your iPhone device, simply click on the iOS Data Backup option. And after that, click on the Continue button for you to proceed on the step.
Step 3: Choose the Way You Want to Backup Your iPhone
In the next step, the program will show you different modes of how you can backup your data. One is the Standard Backup which will allow you to backup your data from your iPhone device without the need of setting up a password. And the other one is the Encrypted Backup wherein you can set up a passcode for your backup file so that no one will have access to it except you.
And after choosing the backup mode that you prefer, you can now go ahead and click on the Start button for you to proceed with the process.
Apple External Hard Drive On Windows 7
Step 4: Choose on Data to Backup from iPhone
After clicking on the Start button, the FoneDog iOS Data Backup and Restore will then start to scan your iPhone device so that it can get all of the data that you have. And after that, you will be able to see on your screen a list of data types that you can backup from your iPhone device. So from here, all you have to do is to choose those that you want to backup.
Step 5: Finish the Backup Process
And once that you are done choosing all of the types of data that you wish to backup from your iPhone using the FoneDog iOS Data Backup and Restore, go ahead then and click on the Next button. Doing this will then start the process of backing up all of the data that you have selected earlier so all you need to do now is to wait for the program to finish the whole process.
Method #2: Restore Your Backup and Save to External Hard Drive
Once that you have made a backup of the data that you have on your iPhone device, then you can easily have them restored and transfer them over to your external hard drive using your Windows PC. And to know how you can do that, just follow these steps.
Step 1: Select the Restore Option
Simply launch the FoneDog iOS Data Backup and Restore and then connect your external hard drive to your computer. Then on the main page of the program, you can go ahead now and select the option iOS Data Restore for you to get those data that you have on the backup file that you made earlier.
Step 2: Choose on the Right Backup File
After backing up your data, the next thing that you need to do is to restore them. So for you to do that, choose on the next page the most recent backup file that you made using the FoneDog iOS Data Backup and Restore.
Step 3: Scan the Chosen Backup File
Once that you are done choosing the backup file, you can now go ahead and click on the View Now option. This way, once that the scanning process is complete, the items that it has scan will show up on your screen.
Step 4: Choose Items to Back
After the scanning process, then you can now go ahead and select all of the items that you would like to restore from the backup file that you made. Then you can have those data restored to your Windows computer. You can do this by clicking on the Restore to PC option from the lower-right corner of your screen.
And once that you have restored your backup file to your Windows computer, then you can have the data be transferred to your external hard drive. You can search for the restored data from your iPhone device to your computer.
iOS Data Backup and RestoreOne click to backup the whole iOS device to your computer.Allow to preview and restore any item from the backup to a device.Export what you want from the backup to your computer.No data loss on devices during the restore.iPhone Restore Won't Overwrite Your Data
Best Apple External Hard Drive
Part 3: Conclusion
As you can see, there are still a lot of ways on how to backup iPhone to external hard drive Windows is one easy task as soon as you have the right tools to use. So with that, just simply follow all of the methods that we have shown you and you will be able to finish the whole process in no time.
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