Mac HDD for windows

[The Price is Rice]

Hey everyone, 

 

My brothers macbook died and he has since replaced it with a windows 10 based laptop. We pulled the HDD fro the mac book and docked it into a a USB HDD enclosure. I have tried using macdrive and HFS+ and most of what other forums have suggested but i cannot access what is on the drive. Windows Disk manager sees the drive and shows it as active but does not allow any other options and does not even show what files system it is. Thanks in advance. 

[Electronics Wizardy]

Try it with a bootable linux usb.

[DrMacintosh]

Is it encrypted with Filevault? If so the only way you can get the data is another Mac. 

[Tabs]

If the disk was encrypted with FileVault you will have a lot of problems accessing the data on the drive.

 

Even if the disk can be mounted, the data will be encrypted. As @Electronics Wizardy said, a bootable Linux distro on usb is your best bet for accessing the data right now, but the tools to enable decryption of FileVault-enabled drives is incredibly experimental, and the repository for the libfvde toolset that had made progress in this area has been pulled.

 

Your best bet is to connect it to another Mac, decrypt it using the volume key, and then copy the data over to the Windows machine. This is definitely unsupported on Windows outside of very expensive forensics software packages, and on Linux it's too experimental for me to recommend it for data that's important.

 

Note: if the disk *Isnt* filevault encrypted, then the Linux method is all you need as it supports hfs+ natively. But from the issues you said you've encountered so far, I have a feeling FileVault is the issue.

[The Price is Rice]

That’s disappointing... thanks everyone. 

 

[NelizMastr]

Another possibility is if it was running High Sierra. By default High Sierra uses APFS and an APFS container can't be read on Windows either. You'd need another Mac to get the data off sadly.