Windows Native Support
Windows 95 and its successors Windows 98, Windows Me can read/write HPFS only when mapped via a network share, but cannot read it from a local disk. They listed the NTFS partitions of networked computers as "HPFS", because NTFS and HPFS share the same filesystem identification number in the partition table.
Windows NT 3.1 and 3.5 have native read/write support for local disks and can even be installed onto an HPFS partition. This is because NT was originally going to be a version of OS/2.
Windows NT 3.51 can also read and write from local HPFS formatted drives. However, Microsoft discouraged using HPFS in Windows NT 4 and in subsequent versions despite upgrades to NT 4.1 operating satisfactorily with servers pre-formatted with HPFS. Microsoft even removed the ability of NT 3.51 to format an HPFS file system. Starting with Windows NT 4 the filesystem driver pinball.sys enabling the read/write access is not included in a default installation anymore. Later Windows versions do not ship with this driver.
Microsoft retained rights to OS/2 technologies, including the HPFS filesystem, after they ceased collaboration with IBM. Since Windows NT 3.1 was designed for more rigorous (enterprise-class) use than previous versions of Windows, it included support for HPFS (and NTFS) giving it a larger storage capacity than FAT filesystems. However, since HPFS lacks a journal, any recovery after an unexpected shutdown or other error state takes progressively longer as the filesystem grows. A utility such as CHKDSK would need to scan each entry in the filesystem to ensure no errors are present, a problem which is vastly reduced on NTFS where the journal is simply replayed.
Read more about this topic: High Performance File System
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