Copy HFS+ to exFAT

Andy Kyselica · Dec 12, 2018

Hi,

I have an external hard drive that has been used on a mac and is formatted to HFS+. I had problems opening in on a mac because it showed up as empty so I plugged it into my windows 10 PC and after using paragon hfs I am now able to see the files (mainly photos). I would like to copy the folders to another drive. I know windows doesn't support hfs+ so I tried to create an exfat partition but the data still wouldn't copy. I can't format the drive because there are valuable pictures that i don't want to lose. Im afraid to convert it to ntfs because it might corrupt the drive.
Im not skilled in this area, and therefore I wanted to ask if there is any way to safely copy the files from the hfs drive to another drive on windows. There are also larger files and so FAT32 would not really work. Thank you.

Solandri · Dec 12, 2018

Being able to see the files doesn't necessarily mean the files are there. The filesystem directory is stored separately from the files themselves. A "file" in this directory is just a pointer to the sector on disk that holds the actual file data. It's possible that the directory is intact, allowing you to navigate the filesystem and see the files, but the data in the files themselves may be corrupt.

If these files are very important, I would suggest getting another equal or bigger drive, then do a sector-by-sector clone of the original to the new drive. That type of cloning is filesystem agnostic. It's basically making a copy of each sector of the original drive, regardless of what information it contains. This differs from a normal clone where each file is copied (so will fail if there's an inconsistency between the filesystem directory and file data).

Then put the original drive in a safe place and work on trying to recover the files from the clone. That will free you up to try repair or undelete tools on the clone (to try to reassociate the file handles in the filesystem directory to the files themselves), without risk of destroying the original data.

Be very careful to clone the original drive to the new drive. I've screwed up before and done it backwards. :ouch:

Edit: Also, Paragon HFS has historically had a reputation for corrupting HFS disks. I'd hoped they'd fixed the problems, but a quick search seems to say they haven't. I'd avoid using it.

https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/insider/forum/all/timely-warning-about-paragon-hfs-drivers/5eebce2d-c30f-4f23-8552-55101f8bc0df

Andy Kyselica · Dec 12, 2018

Solandri :

Being able to see the files doesn't necessarily mean the files are there. The filesystem directory is stored separately from the files themselves. A "file" in this directory is just a pointer to the sector on disk that holds the actual file data. It's possible that the directory is intact, allowing you to navigate the filesystem and see the files, but the data in the files themselves may be corrupt.

If these files are very important, I would suggest getting another equal or bigger drive, then do a sector-by-sector clone of the original to the new drive. That type of cloning is filesystem agnostic. It's basically making a copy of each sector of the original drive, regardless of what information it contains. This differs from a normal clone where each file is copied (so will fail if there's an inconsistency between the filesystem directory and file data).

Then put the original drive in a safe place and work on trying to recover the files from the clone. That will free you up to try repair or undelete tools on the clone (to try to reassociate the file handles in the filesystem directory to the files themselves), without risk of destroying the original data.

Be very careful to clone the original drive to the new drive. I've screwed up before and done it backwards. :ouch:

Edit: Also, Paragon HFS has historically had a reputation for corrupting HFS disks. I'd hoped they'd fixed the problems, but a quick search seems to say they haven't. I'd avoid using it.

https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/insider/forum/all/timely-warning-about-paragon-hfs-drivers/5eebce2d-c30f-4f23-8552-55101f8bc0df

Thank you, I think the data should be intact because I was able to open the files as well, not just see them in explorer. I will search for another way of opening hfs files then, if paragon can corrupt them. Do you have any suggestion for software to do the sector by sector clone?

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Copy HFS+ to exFAT

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