I think that in the end I decided to just use my Dropbox account as a common file pool between Windows and Mac partitioned. In Mac OS X, there are also methods to enable NTFS write support but they always come with 'use at your own risk' type warnings. I haven't had Windows on my Mac in awhile, but I recall that MacDrive does enable HFS+ read/write support. Therefore the support in Mac for NTFS is read-only, and the support in Windows to an HFS+ volume is read-only. There will always be a persistent problem because MS does not want to make HFS+ drivers, and NTFS is proprietary (MS doesn't even have a white paper on it I don't think). The problems that the OP is having, however, will not be fixed even when Bootcamp is updated. True, Bootcamp has not been updated for Windows 8 yet.

Therefore, neither OS X nor Windows needs to know how to read from or write to the other's file system because Parallels acts as a middle layer translating the file onto a virtual file system each OS can access. Since the latter file operations are handled by Parallels guest extensions in Windows, Parallels is provided full read-write access to NTFS by Windows itself. When you drag-and-drop a file from Finder onto your virtualized Windows desktop, Parallels accesses that file, which it has full read-write access to since Parallels is an OS X application being provided read-write HFS+ access by OS X itself, and instructs your virtual Windows desktop to copy the file from a special shared directory that Parallels gives your virtualized Windows instance read-write access to onto the desktop. To create this illusion, Parallels acts as a middle layer which translates all file operations. I believe that Mediafour's version of 'Access Mac disks in Windows' is read-only support, a view further bolstered by Paragon's claim that their HFS+ for Windows software is 'the only solution that provides full read-write access to HFS+/HFSX partitions on any type of disks (GPT, MBR) under most of Windows versions'.ĭespite the fact that it seems that Windows has read-write access to your HFS+ partition and OS X has the same access to your virtualized NTFS partition when you are virtualizing Windows with Parallels, that is not actually the case. While MacDrive claims to allow you to manage your HFS+ partitions from Windows and easily access your files, I can't find anywhere that explicitly states that it provides write support. Last time I checked, Apple's HFS+ driver for Windows allows you to mount your OS X partitions read-only, not read-write.Īs far as I can tell, you only have one option for writing to your HFS+ partition from Windows: the very cleverly named HFS+ for Windows 9.0 from Paragon Software. If you can see the contents of your OS X partition from within Windows, that probably means that you installed the Bootcamp drivers and utilities in Windows.

Write mac files on windows