Windows Mac HDD setup guide
Windows Mac HDD setup guide
Hey everyone, my brother's MacBook stopped working and he swapped it out for a Windows 10 laptop. We removed the old HDD and connected it to a USB HDD case. I've tried macdrive and HFS+ on other forums, but I can't access anything on the drive. Disk Manager lists it as active but doesn't show any options or file system details. Thanks in advance for your help.
Is the file secured using Filevault? If yes, the sole method to retrieve the information is through another Mac.
When the disk uses FileVault encryption, accessing its contents becomes challenging. Even if the drive is mounted, the data remains protected. As mentioned by @Electronics Wizardy, using a Linux distribution from USB offers the most viable solution at the moment. However, tools to unlock FileVault drives are still in early stages, and the libfvde library has been removed from its repository. The safest approach is to connect the drive to another Mac, decrypt it with the volume key, and then transfer the data to a Windows machine. This method isn’t officially supported on Windows except through costly forensic tools, and on Linux it’s too unstable for reliable use. Remember: if the disk isn’t encrypted with FileVault, the Linux path is the only option.
Another chance is that it was operating in High Sierra mode. By default, High Sierra relies on APFS, which means an APFS container wouldn't be accessible on Windows. You'd have to use a different Mac to retrieve the information, unfortunately.