Under the tab, I found my drive. There was a checkbox: "Enable write support for this drive." I checked it. A warning popped up: "Writing to Mac drives can cause data loss if ejected improperly." I acknowledged it like a responsible adult.
I had MacDrive in "read-only" mode (the default for safety). I needed write access. I right-clicked the MacDrive icon in my system tray (the little purple circle near the clock) and selected "MacDrive Settings."
Here’s where it got truly magical: I had an APFS drive that was encrypted with FileVault. Windows saw it as a raw partition. I double-clicked the drive in File Explorer, and a MacDrive password box appeared. I typed my FileVault password. The drive unlocked and mounted instantly. I could read and write encrypted APFS volumes without ever touching a Mac. The story has one dark chapter. One night, tired and careless, I yanked the USB cable out of my PC while a file was still copying to the Mac drive. The next time I plugged it into my Mac, macOS screamed: "Disk not ejected properly." Disk Utility had to repair the volume. I lost 30 minutes of work.
Pro tip from my story: Before rebooting, I unplugged all my Mac-formatted drives. Windows gets confused if it sees an "unreadable" drive during installation. After the reboot, I plugged my drive back in. And there it was: in File Explorer, my Mac drive appeared like any other, with a small purple MacDrive icon next to it. I nearly cried. I double-clicked the drive. Inside were my folders: Movies , Music , Time Machine Backups . I clicked a .mov file. It opened instantly. I copied a Photoshop file from the Mac drive to my Windows desktop. Done.
But I still got permission errors on some folders. That’s because macOS uses Unix permissions. My Windows user account didn’t match my Mac user account (e.g., "Johns-Mac" vs "JOHNS-PC\John").
Here’s the secret trick I learned: I right-clicked the problem folder on the Mac drive, selected → "Security" tab. Suddenly, MacDrive added new options. I clicked "Change Permissions" and gave "Everyone" full control temporarily. That unlocked everything. Chapter 5: The Advanced Magic (APFS & Compression) Not all Mac drives are the same. My new MacBook Pro uses APFS (Apple File System). Older versions of MacDrive had limited APFS write support. But MacDrive Pro (version 11+ fully supports APFS writing).
