time machine

hey there sorry for another question, but i have a seagate 500 gig usb drive, i put all my pics/songs/documents on there from my pc to transfer to the mac. now i took all that stuff put it onto my HDD and now i wana run time machine bt time machine won't see the drive. it is looking for it wirelessly....what am i doing wrong? or what do i need to do to have it use that hard drive to backup? thanks guys. Kinda sucks when you don't know much about new systems lol.

Hmm. I use an external, USB-wired hard drive and it recognized it. Ok, try shutting down, plugging in the drive, then starting up again. Open the Time Machine dialog, click on choose drive, and see if it recognizes it then. It is designed to do that. If that does not work, I learned that I had to reformat the external in Mac format to make it recognize it. Try that?

OnceYouGoMac said:

I learned that I had to reformat the external in Mac format to make it recognize it. Try that?

Click to expand...

Hit the nail on the head....

To the OP: Do you know what your external is formatted to currently?
This is most-likely the problem.

it is a dual OS drive. can be read/write by either mac or pc.

i will try shutting down and restarting the mac. if not i will go into disk utility to formatt it?

Yes. If the drive needs to be formatted it can be done within Disk Utility. The drive has to be formatted HFS+ with journaling enabled.

i had to format the drive to use time machine. thanks for the help everyone.