A customer asked me to have her data recovered from a floppy disk today.

I had no problems reading the directory structure in Windows XP, although the files didn't open properly... But I found some very interesting files such as "finder.dat" and a few other things that gave this away as being Mac formatted.

Under that assumption, I popped it into a G4 machine - Read it perfectly.

I was able to open documents in word pad under Windows XP. They lost their formatting, but I could still read the files.

Does this mean Windows XP can read UFS, Mac Extended (etc..) drive partitions?

I've never had a reason to, but this is useful knowledge to me if anyone knows.

Macs can read FAT and FAT32 partitions with no problem. Also, if a Mac accesses a share (even a windows share via a cifs mount or an smb mount) and it has read/write permissions it will create a couple of .* hidden files in each folder that you traverse.

As a quick test - take a PC formatted ZIP disc with PC data on it and throw it in a Mac - it'll read just fine.

Oh yeah! Oops!. Well it definitely should NOT be able to read HFS, HFS+, or UFS formats. Dunno why it worked for you if it was formatted that way. There is always the chance that the user formatted the disc for windows for compatibility reasons - for instance, they work with Word on both the PC and Mac and want to be able to move the files back and forth (not over the network of course.)

Yeh papa is right. What happened is she has a PC formatted floppy that was used on a Mac, Macs read pc formatted floppys fine, just not the other way around.