MacDrive: More Doubts = My Deletion (Plus A PowerDVD Ultra Update)

On Tuesday, I (among other things) told you that as a preventive measure, I’d at least temporarily disabled the ability for Windows to write to the HFS+ partition on my MacBook via Mediafour’s MacDrive, after having experiencing severe (albeit, fortunately, recoverable) partition corruption that left me unable to boot OS X. Well, as of mid-morning today, MacDrive’s completely off the system. Immediately after switching MacDrive to read-only mode, I started noticing an annoying pop-up warning message from the Mediafour application (which, perhaps obviously, runs on startup) about this setting every time I booted Windows. Recycle Bin also complained every time I emptied it, because it saw the HFS+ partition as a distinct local drive (F:) and wasn’t able to ‘empty’ it (regardless of whether or not it needed emptying) because it was read-only.

I could have lived with those minor annoyances, but over the past few days I’ve noticed a substantial increase in the number of system freezes during standby (along with outright refusals to standby, followed by system freezes during shutdown), of the sort that I’d mentioned earlier. And here’s the topper: this morning, I attempted hibernation for the first time since (successfully) just prior to switching MacDrive to read-only mode…and the system froze. Repeatedly. Consistently. Even when I attempted to enter hibernation immediately after a fresh boot. I scratched my head for a few minutes wondering just what I could have installed or altered since my last successful hibernation that’d cause this behaviour, then on a hunch I uninstalled MacDrive. Standby and hibernation stability have returned. And almost three days after I emailed the company requesting an explanation for my earlier HFS+ corruption issue, I have yet to hear anything back. Nice support (not!), folks; if this is how you treat the technical press, I can only imagine how you ’support’ the average customer.

I don’t know (and I’m not sure I want to know) why the Recycle Bin was attempting to empty stuff from the HFS+ partition, especially considering that I’d never used MacDrive to delete anything from the HFS+ partition (which would subsequently end up in the Recycle Bin)! And I don’t know (and am not sure I want to know) why hibernation cares about the read-only status of my HFS+ partition, especially considering that it writes the hibernation file to NTFS-formatted drive C:. I had a disquieting feeling when I installed MacDrive in the first place, and unfortunately my vibe was valid; this is the inevitable curse of any third-party application that’s particularly intimate with an O/S. I could hope that Microsoft might develop official support for HFS+ in Windows, even if it’s read-only as Apple has done for NTFS…but I’m not that naïve.

By the way, I heard back from CyberLink this morning, and apparently the version of PowerDVD Ultra available for download from the company’s press review site is out-of-date; the latest version of the program does support some driver versions for Intel 945- and 965-chipsets’ integrated graphics. I’m away from my Xbox 360 HD DVD drive at the moment, but once I get back to Sacramento I’ll upgrade PowerDVD Ultra and see if the graphics drivers included with Boot Camp v1.4 pass muster. CyberLink also apologizes for the incorrect information provided by its BD/HD Advisor utility, which is providing out-of-date advice. A new version of the utility will be out, so says CyberLink, by month end.