Wednesday, September 3, 2008

Mounting Mac formatted drives from Windows

I unfortunately no longer have a Mac, since it was owned by my previous employer. Shortsightedly, I had bought music from iTunes on the Mac and formatted my iPod for Mac as well. When I plug my iPod in now, iTunes for Windows wants to reformat my iPod, and of course I don't have a backup of my purchased music.

I've found this free utility called HFSExplorer that lets you mount Mac formatted drives via Windows XP and maybe other Windows OS's. Right now, I'm copying my music from my iPod to my Windows XP laptop at home. I do notice that iPods format their drives differently and the naming convention doesn't allow me to know what I'm copying over. I'm hoping my music is still ID tagged so that iTunes will rename it and sort it correctly. I'll post a comment to this post if it's fully successful.

1 comment:

Reamer77 said...

Yes, it works! Even though the iPod file system has folder names like F00, and files are named ASDF.m4a; the ID tags are still intact. Once I import the directories and allow iTunes to copy/control/organize, everything seems to be back to normal. Unfortunately, I temporarily have two copies of all my music during this "restore process". Duplicating 20GB on my laptop is a lot of space.

My only "wish" with the software is that it could actually allow Windows to mount my iPod with a drive letter, so I could've imported directly to iTunes. Right now, it only allows you to extract from the iPod to the computer, and then once on the computer, I can import into iTunes. But hey, I'm not complaining. I wanted a free utility to recover my music, and I got it. Many thanks to the developer.