Formatting an external disk?

I am slowly getting used to my shiny new iMac. I want to get a 1 Tb external HDD and partition it so that I can format one partition for Time Machine and the other for backups for my Microsoft laptop.

Does anyone know if it is possible to do this? I would assume that the Mac would look at the partitions as separate drives, but I'm not totally sure?

Yes it's quite easy to partition an external drive - use Disk Utility (comes with MacOS)

Creating 2 partitions with different filesystems is no problem at all and yes, it will mount as 2 seperate drives

It is possible to create two partitions for your needs.
Make a HPFS+ file system partition for your TimeMachine backups, or even create a
partition without formatting it - the first time you select this logic drive for TimeMachine it will properly format it.
The second one you will have to format in NTFS to work properly with Windows machines.

Thanks guys! That is how I thought it would be, but good to be sure.

Now off to Amazon to spend some more of me pension!!

Keep in mind that if you do format one partition to NTFS then you will need to use a 3rd party driver to have write permissions to that partition from Mac OS. Not sure if you even need to be able to access it, just thought I could mention that.

You can use NTFS-3G ... discussed many many times even on these forums

Snow Leopard has native r/w support for NTFS partitions/drives. Take a look at this. You have to do some work with the Terminal but it's there. This is of course irrelevant if you don't want write support for the NTFS partition.

vansmith said:

Snow Leopard has native r/w support for NTFS partitions/drives. Take a look at this. You have to do some work with the Terminal but it's there. This is of course irrelevant if you don't want write support for the NTFS partition.

Click to expand...

Hey van do you have any personal experience with the SL r/w capabilities of NTFS partitions/drives? I always seemed to use 3rd party drivers for some reason, however nor NTFS3G or Paragon support 64bit kernel, so it's a bit of a hassle. I guess I will give this a try again

3rd party software might still be the way to go for externals, since it looks like fstab needs to be edited by the disk UUID ... anyway tnx for bringing it up

You really don't even have to turn on the NTFS R/W capability of Snow Leopard from the terminal. This handy small free app does it all for you. LINK to "NTFS Mounter" Been using it ever since Snow Leopard came out. Works great.

Regards.