Ke Colin Zheng

BootCamp provides Mac users with a close-to-perfect solution to run dual-boot on their mac machines. You can access the windows partition on a mac easily with BootCamp, but not the other way around. 🙁

I would like to access my Mac partition while running Windows XP, and for that, there are bunch of third party solutions: MacDrive, TransMac, and HFSExplorer. I tried all three and I’m reporting some first-hand experience with these products. It’s by no means a thorough analysis with any side-by-side detailed comparisons. Even worse, some of the glitches I ran into might not even due to any of these systems, but at the end of the day, it’s your gut feeling that really makes the call, isn’t it? 🙂

• MacDrive provides the best interface and functionality. The Mac drive looks, feels and runs exactly like a windows drive. I fell in love with it for a few days, but after endless of failures to reboot, I finally located some serious pitfalls for MacDrive. For one, I noticed some weird behavior after enabling write access on Mac drive. It somehow modifies the mac indexing every time you modifies the Mac drive via Windows XP, so once boot in Mac, lookup has to re-index the drive (time consuming). Moreover, if you have the System Restore turn on, and you disable the write access to your Mac drive, then the system gets very fragile. I guess one reason is System Restore tries to make backup copies on the disk and fails due to read-only access. However, when I tried to disable System Restore, I wasn’t able to do so for some reason. I ended up un-install MacDrive, and all problems seem gone.
• TransMac is very stable and simple to use with its file-explorer like interface. One note: you need to make sure you have administrator right in order to access your Mac Drive. The access to the Mac drive is done indirectly implicitly. Meaning, if you want to open a file on your Mac drive, TransMac makes a local copy onto your windows disk, and access from there.
• HFSExplorer has the smallest feature set among the three. But it’s purely free. It has an interface very similar to TransMac, and data access is explicitly indirect. You have to extract the file to your windows local directory before any operation on the file.

So here is the take-away message: if you don’t want to pay anything and you know what you are doing, HFSExplorer is all you need; MacDrive and TransMac cost about the same(50$), I see MacDrive as a solution for dummies (in a nice yet unreliable way), and TransMac seems a nice balance among the three.

This entry was posted on Monday, February 2nd, 2009 at 7:35 am and is filed under Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.