11-28-2009, 04:14 PM

Hello all. This is my first post.

I'm relatively new to the Mac OS. I bought my first mac about nine weeks ago. A 13" MacBook Pro.

I also have a Windows Vista desktop machine. I have a 1TB external hard drive plugged into it for backup purposes. I use the backup and restore center that comes with Vista. I was wanting to know: is there a way that I can wirelessly access this drive and use it with Time Machine.

Here's what I did. I set up the Vista machine (let's call it "Vista") to share the drive across the network. I called it "backup". In finder, I pressed cmd+K and in the box I typed //Vista/backup. The drive mounted and is sitting on my desktop. I can read and write to it just fine now.

Next, after some help from Google, I went to terminal and typed
"defaults write com.apple.systempreferences TMShowUnsupportedNetworkVolumes 1" (without the quotes)

Now, I go into time machine preference. Viola! The drive is in my options. I click on the drive, and it tells me that it is starting the backup. It says "making hard disk available. It sits like this for some time (about 15 minutes) until it says that it cannot create the back up could not be created.

You guys are smart. What do I need to do now? Thank you.

EDIT: Also, when time machine is running, a new file appears on the drive. It grows to be about 800MB before time machine quits. It's a .DMG.Temp so I'm sure its from the Mac, not the Vista.

11-28-2009, 04:50 PM

I've tried this as well on Mac OS X Leopard with not much luck. I had the exact problem you stated, but with more searching the net, I found the situation was a hit-or-miss in most cases. However, I also found info. with backup failures after a couple of months of use even after a successful Time machine setup.

Anyone want to shine some light on this?

11-28-2009, 05:15 PM

I suspect that both the setup difficulties and the backups failing after a period of time are due to the way the drive is formatted. Drives formatted with recent versions of Windows are usually NTFS while Macs currently use HFS+.Time Machine is expecting HFS+. Here's an overview I wrote a few months ago about Time machine that might fill in the gaps ATPM 15.03 - How To: Time Travel: Introduction to Time Machine

I have seen a hint suggesting that it is possible to create one external drive that has both NTFS and HFS+ partitions but haven't created one yet so I am not sure how reliably the drive would perform. Create an HFS+/NTFS/FAT32 external drive - Mac OS X Hints I suggest reading all of the comments. Some of the later comments simplify the process a bit.

11-30-2009, 02:11 AM

On my mac, I split the drive in half and made an NTFS and a HFS+. The Vista could not find the HFS+, and then the mac could not either.