Sharing an external hdd w/ pc...

I searched the forums and google for an answer to this question and couldn't come up with anything ... hopefully ya'll can help me...

I have a 500 gb external hdd that I have had for a couple of years that I have used to keep my pc backed up... I still have about 250 gb of free space on that drive and want to use it with time machine to keep my MB backed up... I tried plugging the USB into MB but Time Machine wanted to wipe out my external drive before it would let me back up to it...

I think what I want to do is called "partition" but I'm not sure if that is the correct term or if that's what I want to do...

I want to use part of that drive as my backup for my MB and leave the rest of it alone for my pc back up... I do not want to use it over my wifi network I just want to use it via my USB...

Well?

Thanks for all the help I have received in the last week since I got my first MB!

Time Machine suggestions say that you should only use a drive dedicated to that purpose : backing up, I am sure you could partition it and make it work but I foresee problems running it that way.

Partitioning is what you need to do.

Split the drive 50/50 into 2 partitions. Let Time machine format one and manually format the other in Disk Utility or on your PC.

Shouldn't be a problem. I've been running just such an external since Leopard was released. Never had cause to do a full system restore but I've restored many files and folders from the TM backup without issue.

BTW- partitioning in OSX is easy- just go into disk utility, click on the drive you want to partition, and click partition.

I'm in the same boat, with a 500G drive.

Do I HAVE to partition it to use it with PC? I'm planning on using it with Time Machine. Any issues?

Larry

I've been using a Western Digital 250GB Passport for both Windows and Mac (Tiger) for a while now. I have 2 partitions, one for Windows, one for Mac, and no problem. I also have a third partition of about 25GB for transferring between the two (it's formatted FAT32 vs. NTFS for the Windows partition). Makes it quite nice to be able to share stuff with my friends on the boat.