How to Recover Data Deleted from an HFS Drive If this has been your experience, or if you accidentally allowed Windows to format your drive to a compatible system, the next section will help you recover any data you lost in the process. Often, Windows will even prompt you to format the drive to a compatible system such as exFAT, FAT, or NTFS – but that means all your files will be deleted in the process.įurther attempting to engage with a file system that is incompatible with the Windows operating system will likely return errors and may eventually cause data loss. Try to use it, and Windows will simply return a “USB device not recognized” error. Since HFS+ is an Apple drive format, you can’t use or even read an HFS+ partition or drive on Windows. Since HFS is pretty much obsolete, and data recovery instructions are the same between these two formats, we’ll only be referring to HFS+ for the rest of the article.
HFS+ is an update to the original HFS format, built to address larger volumes and handle data storage more efficiently. HFS/HFS+, which you can find in Disk Utility as “Mac OS (Extended)”, is a file system format optimized for Mac hard drives – as opposed to the Apple File System ( APFS), which was developed for newer Macs with solid state drives. What is HFS File Format and How It Differs From HFS+
How to Recover Data Deleted from an HFS Drive.What is HFS File Format and How It Differs From HFS+.