Advice on Time Machine HDD Prep and Boot Camp

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Hi;

The title may seem a bit of a mixed bag however I can assure you they are all linked.

My plan is to install Boot Camp and install Windows XP and I also need to prep a USB Hard Drive for Time Machine, so before I do I'd like plan ahead to avoid anything that will affect anything later down the line.

I am advised to backup the Macbook before running Boot camp so I have no option to setup the Hard Drive first.

1. If I run Time Machine and then partition the Macbook how will Time Machine react when it next does a backup when it finds that the Hard Drive has changed.

2. According to the Verbatim manual the HDD comes FAT32 formatted, will Time Machine be able to change this to HFS or do I use disk utility.

3. After installing Boot Camp and XP will Time Machine backup just the Mac portion or will it backup the XP section as well.

4. XP cannot read or write to HFS so I'll need to install something like Macdrive.

I have several options but just want to make things as easy as possible.

I have a Macbook Pro, an iMac and a Windows Media Centre HTPC.

iMac - 300GB SATA
Macbook - 250GB SATA
HTPC - 250GB ATA

Ta
 

chscag

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1. Time Machine will ignore the Boot Camp partition.

2. Time Machine is a backup program, nothing else. Use Disk Utility to re-format the external to HFS+.

3. See answer to 1. Time Machine will ignore the BC partition.

4. It's best to go the other way. (OS X to BC) If the BC partition is FAT-32, OS X can read and write to it. However, if the BC partition is NTFS you will need a third party application (Paragon NTFS) to read and write. OS X can only read but not write to NTFS.

Regards.
 
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JonnyAlpha
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4. It's best to go the other way. (OS X to BC) If the BC partition is FAT-32, OS X can read and write to it. However, if the BC partition is NTFS you will need a third party application (Paragon NTFS) to read and write. OS X can only read but not write to NTFS.

So I'll format the USB Hard Drive HFS+ and setup Boot Camp to Install XP on my Macbook on a FAT32 partition.

This setup will ensure that Time Machine doesn't complain about the external Hard Drive and that my Macbook can access the XP Partition on the Macbook.

I will still have to run Macdrive on the HTPC and the XP partition of the Macbook so that they too can read and write files on the external Hard Drive as I'll also be using it to store photos music media etc.

Ta
 

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