Mediafour MacDrive 7 for Windows Review

Written by Dave

Wednesday, 25 June 2008

My friend recently had a problem with his Western Digital 500GB hard drives which he used in an enclosure. The hard drives all of a sudden failed to work, and his computer's could not read them. Being that it was formatted in HFS, PCs could not easily read them, and being that we didn't know anyone with a Mac Pro, testing the hard drives would be hard. Cue Mediafour's MacDrive.

MacDrive allows your Windows computer to access hard drives formatted in Apple's standard file system format of Hierarchical File System or HFS. Typically, if you were to plug in an Apple hard drive into your Windows computer, it would not be able to mount it. You would be able to see the hard drive in your device manager, but would not be able to access it. Mediafour's MacDrive allows you to do this.

Why would you need to? Well, for the most part, Apple desktop computers are not very easy to open up and switch hard drives, and Mac Pro's are way too expensive for the average user. So with MacDrive you can connect your hard drive to a PC, which most people have.

So, my friend's hard drives stopped working properly, and he wasn't sure if the hard drives were dead or not, and if he was still able to access all of his data. So he brought over his hard drives in an attempt to recover his data and transfer them to new Seagate drives.

The first obstacle was that, MacDrive 7 does not work on Windows Vista 64. Luckily, I had an older computer lying around with SATA that I could open up and use. That problem was solved. We installed MacDrive on my Windows XP computer, and it installed with no problems. It comes with a 5-day trial period, which was good enough for us, since we'd only need it for this one day, if all goes well.

Then, after installing the hard drives onto my computer, we were glad to find that MacDrive worked great. It discovered the hard drives without a problem, and displayed them in My Computer. It put a little symbol on the Hard Drive Letter's icon to denote that it was a HFS hard drive. That being said, we were able to just drag and drop from one HFS hard drive to the other, and also to my NTFS hard drives very easily. His hard drives were fine. Except for some reason his hard drives could not be read while in his enclosure.

So we used MacDrive's feautres to Diagnose and Repair the hard drives which worked. And then after backing up the data from the Western Digitals to the Seagates, we formatted the Western Digitals. After that they hard drives could be read by the iBook.

Review

I think MacDrive is a good piece of software. It's typically used to share data between your Mac and your Windows PC, but it can also be used to aid in the recovery of data if you don't have a Mac Pro lying around. It costs about $50 and is cheaper if you buy multiple licenses. If you aren't sure you like it, you can test it out for free with a 5-day trial.

Once you install, it works right away, and there aren't any extra steps needed to access the hard drives. Once a hard drive is connected via enclosure or plugged directly into the motherboard, it will display the hard drive in your "My Computer" window, and you can access the files on it.

Even better, you can repair or format the hard drives if you need to from your Windows computer. One problem I did notice was that errors showed up when I tried to repair the hard drive right after using it. However, once you close all of the Windows accessing the hard drive, and let it sit for a few minutes, the repair worked right away.