Frustration with Time Machine and Boot Camp. help!

ugh. ok so here's the deal:

I just installed Leopard and everything seemed fine. I plugged in a new 500GB external hard drive and partitioned it into 2. the 350 GB was for backup (time machine) and the other 150 was for storage (movies, music, whatever)

so time machine backs up to the one half and i move my videos and whatnot from my internal over to the other half. now a couple of hours later it informs me that it is "Unable to complete backup. An error occurred while creating the backup directory". i say "ok" and force a back up only to have it back up 2.2MB and then just stay there, stuck. i restarted my comp and tried again, and again - it has been stuck on 2.2 MB so i dont know what the problem is.
*EDIT* ok so now i cancelled the backup and tried to start it over and it immediately goes to the " Unable to complete backup. An error occurred while creating the backup directory" so i dont know..


Now as far as Boot Camp goes: I'm trying to partition 25GB of my internal HD to give over to XP and it tells me that i need to re format it into one single journaled hard drive first, and then put all my data i backed up back on before trying to bootcamp again (which im not about to do when Time Machine isn't even working, im not about to loose all my data) the thing is i have never partitioned before so it is a single hard drive, and i checked in disk utility and it says that is a "Mac OSX Extended (Journaled)" drive so what is the problem!?

AND if i do need to reformat my internal (even though i shouldn't have to) will time machine (granted i get it working) put all my data back? or should i not rely on it for that?

Ugh if you have ANY help to offer please, please do.

So far not that happy with Leopard.

i haven´t read all of your post, but for backup sw i don´t recommend time machine. use superduper instead. google for it.

I moved to my MacBook Pro from a PC last May. I do the same thing as you. Here's what I did, and why.

Time Machine backup creates only a single file that grows to hold the backups as you add to it. So it doesn't need its own partition.

When I first used Time Machine, I attached an old 400GB USB drive (formatted in NTFS), and Time Machine prompted me to format it to HPFS with Journaling, then proceeded with the TM backup.

After TM backup is completed, I can quit the TM program and use Finder to detach the TM backup drive. Before TM needs to do another backup again, I re-connect my USB to my MacBook and it gets attached, showing a hard-drive icon. (If it doesn't show up, you may have to restart your Mac with the USB drive connected).

I like TM because it allows me to recover previous versions of specific files without doing a wholesale restore to a previous machine state (like a Restore Checkpoint in Windows).

Once the USB drive is recognized by OS X, you can open it, create a folder for your bulk data and drag that data from the Macintosh HD to this new folder on the USB drive.

I messed around with BootCamp for a few weeks and moved over to the virtual machine to run Windows XP on Mac OS X because it allows me to use Windows programs concurrently with Mac programs; no reboot and no duplication of utilities. I chose Vmware Fusion and have been happily using it since last June.