Member Avatar for jawaits

I have a 1TB External drive full of movies and pictures from my mac and i need a way to see all of those files on a pc so i can watch a movie with my girlfriend

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Short expert summary and practical steps.

As noted, the first question is detection versus playback: is the PC not seeing the physical disk at all, or is the disk visible but the files/partitions do not appear in Explorer? A quick check in Windows Disk Management (run diskmgmt.msc) and Device Manager will show whether the drive hardware is detected even if the filesystem is not mountable.

Safest, simplest route when an actual Mac is available: copy the media off the Mac-formatted disk onto another drive formatted for both platforms (exFAT is the usual choice because it supports files larger than 4 GB—FAT32 does not). On macOS use Disk Utility to erase/format the target as exFAT with a GUID partition scheme for large drives, or enable SMB file sharing and stream/copy files over the network. Important: reformatting destroys data; always copy files first.

If only a PC is available, there are two common approaches: install a third-party Windows driver that provides read (and sometimes write) access to Mac filesystems (commercial and free options exist, with tradeoffs in stability and write-safety), or boot a Linux live USB to mount the disk and copy files off. Useful Linux checks:

lsblk -f
sudo fdisk -l

HFS+ partitions can often be mounted read-only (sudo mount -t hfsplus -o ro /dev/sdXY /mnt); APFS (used on newer Macs) is harder to access from Linux/Windows without specialized drivers.

Checklist / cautions: try a different USB cable or powered port if the drive is not detected; prefer read-only access tools when recovering data to avoid corruption; never reformat the original disk until a verified backup exists; for long-term cross-platform use, exFAT is the practical choice. As pointed out, both free and commercial solutions exist for reading Mac-formatted disks on Windows—choose based on need for read-only safety versus full read/write access.

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Member Avatar for caperjack

so ,you computer doesn't even see the harddrive ,or sees it and just cant play the different file type .if so get VLC media player it plays all types of media files

Member Avatar for jawaits

so ,you computer doesn't even see the harddrive ,or sees it and just cant play the different file type .if so get VLC media player it plays all types of media files

It wont see the hard drive i think i need a driver for my pc

Member Avatar for caperjack

search model number of external device on www.google.com
for drivers for windows
post the model # here if you wish

Member Avatar for rubberman

Here are links to commercial products that will let you do this: http://www.paragon-software.com/home/hfs-windows/ or
For a free program that can access files on your HFS/HFS+ drive (the formats that Apple uses), try this: http://www.catacombae.org/hfsx.html

FWIW, there are HFS/HFS+ open source drivers for Linux.

Edited by rubberman because: n/a
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