Confused about bootcamp and accessing mac files from within windows

[#Michael]

So I installed bootcamp on my mbp last night and have windows 8 running great. But I am confused on how I can access any of my files from my mac partition. The mac partition shows up but I cannot seem to actually do anything with it. I know that when I used vmware or parallels before it was dead simple with drag and drop. Do I need a 3rd party program like macdrive by mediafour?

[Karl L.]

If you can see the contents of your OS X partition from within Windows, that probably means that you installed the Bootcamp drivers and utilities in Windows. Last time I checked, Apple's HFS+ driver for Windows allows you to mount your OS X partitions read-only, not read-write.

As far as I can tell, you only have one option for writing to your HFS+ partition from Windows: the very cleverly named HFS+ for Windows 9.0 from Paragon Software. While MacDrive claims to allow you to manage your HFS+ partitions from Windows and easily access your files, I can't find anywhere that explicitly states that it provides write support. I believe that Mediafour's version of "Access Mac disks in Windows" is read-only support, a view further bolstered by Paragon's claim that their HFS+ for Windows software is "the only solution that provides full read-write access to HFS+/HFSX partitions on any type of disks (GPT, MBR) under most of Windows versions".

Despite the fact that it seems that Windows has read-write access to your HFS+ partition and OS X has the same access to your virtualized NTFS partition when you are virtualizing Windows with Parallels, that is not actually the case. To create this illusion, Parallels acts as a middle layer which translates all file operations. When you drag-and-drop a file from Finder onto your virtualized Windows desktop, Parallels accesses that file, which it has full read-write access to since Parallels is an OS X application being provided read-write HFS+ access by OS X itself, and instructs your virtual Windows desktop to copy the file from a special shared directory that Parallels gives your virtualized Windows instance read-write access to onto the desktop. Since the latter file operations are handled by Parallels guest extensions in Windows, Parallels is provided full read-write access to NTFS by Windows itself. Therefore, neither OS X nor Windows needs to know how to read from or write to the other's file system because Parallels acts as a middle layer translating the file onto a virtual file system each OS can access.

[kevpan815]

Has Bootcamp even been Updated yet for Windows 8? Last time that I checked running Boot Camp was still 4.0 which Supports Windows 7 but NOT Windows 8, although I had NOT yet reinstalled Mountain Lion with an Integraded 10.8.2 from the Mac App Store. Perhaps you could share with me how you got Windows 8 running on Bootcamp as I would prefer to run Windows 8 rather than Windows 7 as well on my Apple Bootcamp Partition.

[kevpan815]

I just checked and Apple Bootcamp on Mac OS X 10.8.2 is still telling me that it Supports only Windows 7 right now! If there were a 10.8.3 I would have access to it before the General Public as I am in all 3 Apple Developer Programs! Exactly where did you find Win 8 Support?

[Karl L.]

While I can't speak from experience as I no longer have an Intel-based Mac, I suspect that BlendedFrog either installed the drivers directly (probably by extracting them and installing directly via Device Manager) or used Windows 7 compatibility mode to trick the Bootcamp installer into thinking it was running under Windows 7.

I used a combination of these two methods to run the Windows 7 beta on my former Macbook Pro. First, I extracted the drivers from the drivers disc and used Device Manager to install them. Then, I used Windows Vista compatibility mode to make the Vista-era Bootcamp utility install under Windows 7. It worked as well as it did under Windows Vista, as best I can remember.

In my experience, Apple's driver support for Windows is exceptionally poor: doubly so for versions they do not officially support. Consider yourself warned; proceed with caution.

[Shadrack]

True, Bootcamp has not been updated for Windows 8 yet. The problems that the OP is having, however, will not be fixed even when Bootcamp is updated. There will always be a persistent problem because MS does not want to make HFS+ drivers, and NTFS is proprietary (MS doesn't even have a white paper on it I don't think). Therefore the support in Mac for NTFS is read-only, and the support in Windows to an HFS+ volume is read-only.

I haven't had Windows on my Mac in awhile, but I recall that MacDrive does enable HFS+ read/write support. In Mac OS X, there are also methods to enable NTFS write support but they always come with "use at your own risk" type warnings.

I think that in the end I decided to just use my Dropbox account as a common file pool between Windows and Mac partitioned. Seems ridiculous but I think that it is the only truly safe way of working on the same files between the two OS. And of course, no matter what you ever do always have a regularly scheduled backup routine.

P.S. Don't expect the bootcamp drivers for Windows 8 at the time of release. As I recall, Apple took months to update Bootcamp drivers for Windows 7.

[threetonesun]

I think that in the end I decided to just use my Dropbox account as a common file pool between Windows and Mac partitioned. Seems ridiculous but I think that it is the only truly safe way of working on the same files between the two OS. And of course, no matter what you ever do always have a regularly scheduled backup routine.

You can also use a VM to load the boot camp partition and work with files that way. Or, format an external drive NTFS and install the NTFS drivers for OSX.

There's no great way of doing it, unfortunately.

[Karl L.]

There will always be a persistent problem because MS does not want to make HFS+ drivers, and NTFS is proprietary (MS doesn't even have a white paper on it I don't think). Therefore the support in Mac for NTFS is read-only, and the support in Windows to an HFS+ volume is read-only.

While it is true that no one has made a read/write HFS+ driver for Windows, and likely never will, it is still theoretically a possibility. Although Apple releases some of the OS X source code on their open-source site, I'm not sure if HFS+ is one of the components they have released. However, there is a working read/write HFS+ driver in the Linux kernel which could theoretically be ported to Windows the same way as the Ext2Fsd Project ported the EXT2/3 driver to Windows. While it would certainly take a lot of knowledge, dedication, and hard word, the framework used in Ext2Fsd could likely be reused for a HFS+ implementation.

As for enabling read/write support for NTFS in OS X, I'm sure that I have heard of products claiming to have mastered the feat. Also since OS X is FreeBSD based, it should be less difficult to port a theoretical FreeBSD NTFS driver (which as far as I can tell doesn't exist apart from FUSE) or the Linux NTFS driver to OS X than it would be to port the Linux HFS+ driver to Windows. Again, I'm not claiming that it would be trivial, but its theoretically possible (disregarding GPL/APL/BSD license compatibility issues, of course).

Although I don't have a working OS X installation to test this on at the moment, I believe that you can mount a NTFS partition read/write with the official OS X NTFS driver in Snow Leopard or later using mount. You could try something like the following to test my assumption:

$ diskutil list
$ sudo mkdir /Volumes/rar
$ sudo mount -t ntfs -o rw,force /dev/disk1s1 /Volumes/rar # Assuming your NTFS partition is /dev/disk1s1 (according to the diskutil command above).
$ sudo touch /Volumes/rar/test.txt
$ [ -e /Volumes/rar/test.txt ] && echo 'The volume was mounted read/write!'
[/CODE]

Assuming that the above test worked, you could add it to your [i]fstab[/i] to force it to mount this way every time as follows:

[CODE]
$ diskutil info /Volumes/rar
$ sudo nano /etc/fstab
# Add the following line (not this comment) after the other entries in fstab.
UUID=your_volume_uuid_from_the_diskutil_command_above /Volumes/rar ntfs defaults,rw,force 0 2
$ sudo umount /Volumes/rar
$ sudo mount -a
$ sudo touch /Volumes/rar/test.txt
$ [ -e /Volumes/rar/test.txt ] && echo 'The volume was mounted read/write!'
$ sudo rm -f /Volumes/rar/test.txt
[/CODE]

You should see the text "The volume was mounted read/write!" after both the test and after you make it permanent is [i]fstab[/i] if you followed all my steps (and they're correct, which I can't verify at the moment).