HFS+ Windows Drivers Found in Snow Leopard's Boot Camp

Mac-focused site MacRumors claims to have gained knowledge of Windows HFS+ drivers being included with Apple's Boot Camp utility under Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard. The drivers will allow Windows installations to read Mac OS X HFS+ formatted partitions, making it easier for users to move and edit files between the Windows and Mac OS.

According to the report in question, the utility that allows users to boot Microsoft's Windows on their Intel Macs includes the necessary Windows drivers to support the hardware on every existing Macintosh. However, Windows doesn't generally recognize Mac formatted hard drives, thus making it hard or impossible to read or write to them without installing the necessary drivers. “The newest version of Snow Leopard's Boot Camp appears to include these special drivers to allow read access to Mac data even under Windows,” the site has learned.

According to Apple, “Boot Camp supports the most popular 32-bit releases of Windows XP and Windows Vista. When you use either operating system on your Mac, your Windows applications will run at native speed. Windows applications have full access to multiple processors and multiple cores, accelerated 3D graphics, and high-speed connections like USB, FireWire, Wi-Fi, and Gigabit Ethernet.”

“If you’re already working with Boot Camp Beta, you’re practically finished before you start. All you need is some new drivers. To install them, simply start up your Mac in Windows and update the drivers from the Leopard DVD,” the description for the current version of Boot Camp (in Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard) reads. The same methods should apply to Snow Leopard (Mac OS X 10.6) users as well.

As reported earlier today, the latest Snow Leopard seed shows signs of less adding of features and more tweaking and bug fixing, according to the folks at World of Apple. The source points out to the addition of Chinese handwriting recognition on multi-touch-capable Macs as a notable change. Mac OS X 10.6 Build 10A354 lists enough known issues to keep developers busy for another week or so.