Looks like Mediafour’s MacDrive 8 will support Windows 7. The MacDrive8 beta is already available for you to download.
This is great news for video editors like myself who couldn’t wait and already migrated everything over the Windows 7. The only thing missing for me was MacDrive.
Click here to download the MacDrive 8 beta for Windows 7
Note: there is a big difference between HFS Explorer and MacDrive. The former is a very basic utility that lets you open up HFS formatted hard drives and copy (“extract”) files to your PC. It doesn’t work the other way around and you can’t use it to, say, edit directly off of the HFS drives.
MacDrive allows your PC to see HFS formatted drives to be seen just like any other hard drive. You can edit straight off of those kind of drives with Premiere Pro, Avid, Vegas etc. if you wanted to.
Since at the time of this writing Mediafour’s MacDrive still doesn’t work with Windows 7 I thought it’s a good idea to let you know that you can access Mac-formatted hard drives via a free utility called HFSExplorer.
It’s not as easy to use as MacDrive but it’s free and it gets the job done. You will be able to move files from your Mac formatted drive over to your Windows machine but probably won’t be able to work with it like you would with MacDrive, ie use, for example, Premiere Pro to access the drive directly.
STEPS
1) Install HFS Explorer (download it here)
2) Once installed, open up HFS Explorer, go to FILE > Load File System from Device
3) From the pop up select Autodetect, or select the device (= harddrive) yourself.
4) It should open up a window of your Mac formatted drive now.
5) Select the folder(s) you want to copy and click Extract
6) Select the folder on your Windows machine you want the files copied to
If it asks you if you want to follow symbolic links click select No
HFS Explorer should now copy your files to your Windows machine. Make sure you close our HFS Explorer before removing the external hard drive.
Hope this helps.
It’s such a bummer – I’ve been having a ball editing on Windows 7 using the Adobe CS4 suite with nary a problem. As a matter of fact, virtually all my other applications work flawlessly on Windows 7 and over all I have to say my workflow is now even faster and more efficient, particularly on the Windows 7 64 bit platform.
However there is one exception that really throws this all off and that’s the fact that MacDrive does not work with Windows 7 at all. You can’t even install it.
Mediafour is aware of the problem and doesn’t seem to care too much right now. Here is what they have to say about this.
Since some of my clients use external firewire drives formatted for the Mac, I’ve been using MacDrive for some time with great success on XP.
So if you plan on jumping over to Windows 7 (and I recommend it) then you won’t be able to use MacDrive.
One workaround:
1) Set up dual boot on your system. Say Windows 7 plus Windows XP.
2) Boot into Windows XP, import your footage to your main editing drive (I use RAID 0 drives for raw files) from those Mac-formatted drives using MacDrive as usual.
3) Restart and boot into Windows 7. This will work. A pain in the butt for sure but until Mediafour gets its act together there’s no other way.
