While I was booted into Windows XP via Boot Camp on my Intel Mac, I was frustrated by the inability to access the files on my Mac's HFS+ hard drive. So I wrote
HFSExplorer, a free application for extracting files from an HFS+ volume (Mac OS Extended) located either on a physical disk, on a .dmg disk image, or in a raw file. Beyond Boot Camp users, other possible users include:
- Owners of HFS+ formatted iPods that wish to access their content from within Windows or elsewhere (a user emailed me and verified that this works).
- Users of PearPC or similar Mac emulation/virtualization software that wish to access the contents of their virtual hard disks (will only work if the disk image is stored in raw format, as in PearPC).
- People that need to access the contents of HFS+ formatted .dmg files (conversion is no longer needed).
The program is written mostly in Java 1.5, with Windows-specific parts written in C in order to be able to get raw access to block devices, which seemed impossible with the standard API, and to create a practical launcher application. The program is released under the GPL (
download source [312KB]), and full installation and usage instructions can be found on the above-linked page.
[
robg adds: I haven't tested this one, but it seems like a simpler and cheaper solution (albeit not as fully featured) than
MacDrive.]