Macs are Fun :)

So I ended up buying off a friend a pretty cool Mac Mini. But it's a fairly basic one I think. Power PC G4 1 Gig ram 1.25 GIG with 120GIG hdd. I've been spending most of my afternoons that i am free playing with it and setting it up the way I want Have to say love it

But I do have a few questions though.

In regards to my external hard drives, I have a Western Digital 1TB hard drive that I plan on using with the mac mini. This drive will contain all my photos and documents that I will be using on my Mac Mini as I slowly make the migrate over to the Mac . My question is I think I know that I have to re-format the external hard drive from NTFS or FAT 32 in order for the Mac OS system to be able to read it and write to it. Am I correct in this?

Time Machine needs to be setup and I plan on setting it up on this hard drive. In regards to the Time Machine, should I have a separate external drive for that or can I use the hdd for documents and also set up the time machine back up feature?

Currently going through the rest of the forum to see if any of my other questions have been answered.

Kind Regards
ShadowDan

ShadowDan said:

My question is I think I know that I have to re-format the external hard drive from NTFS or FAT 32 in order for the Mac OS system to be able to read it and write to it. Am I correct in this?

Click to expand...

Yes.

In regards to the Time Machine, should I have a separate external drive for that or can I use the hdd for documents and also set up the time machine back up feature?

Click to expand...

Time Machine backs up to a disk image so you can have both general files and a TM backup on the same HD. The question of course is what are you backing up the general files to them, hmmm?

Backing them up on a spare laptop at the moment and onto DVD-RW on a weekly basis. I would like to keep them on an external back up as well, which is what I intend to do when I fully migrate to the Mac, but that won't happen for some time yet.

Thanks for your help and what program do I need to use in order to convert the external so that the Mac Mini can read to and from it?

If you are only using it for a Mac, then it needs to be Mac OS extended (journaled). If you want to be able to use it with other operating systems, then it needs to be Fat-32.

Time Machine needs to use the external hard drive. You can also save documents etc seperately on the same external HD as TM.

I'm not 100% sure about this, but doesn't Time Machine require the external drive to be formatted HFS+?

It wouldn't allow me to format it Fat32 through Windows 7. It was previously NTFS before I wiped it. (Nothing really important on it anyway).

I'm going to have to re-format it again using Disk Utility. Should work properly this time. And yes I think I will have it both with Windows and Mac as I intend to use the external with my Windows multimedia laptop from time to time.

You wont be able to use it for Time Machine if you format it as FAT32.
You have to format it FAT32 in order to use it on both Windows and OSX.
I would highly recommend a completely different drive for Time Machine anyway - it can fill up fast.

Cool I think I can swing another external for the Time Machine thing. But will look into other programs as well to do a full backup of the OS and stuff. I did see a topic about that over here somewhere.

There are others, and Time Machined does a full backup the first time it runs. After that, it does incremental backups as things change.

Cool thanks for your help.
So far my setup has been very easy and simple and now that I can access my hard drive using that Fat partition format on both my windows machine and mac, it will make writing to the HDD from my mac much easier. I do plan on switching to my mac full time eventually, I still use my multimedia laptop next to my mac mini for TV viewing and videos/dvd. I am not really sure if this Mac Mini can do all that at this stage. Rather not push it to it's limit yet.

I am using this forum as a guide at the moment so I'm trying to answer some questions I already have without taking much more of your time

The only thing i can't get working is my DVI output through my Samsung SyncMaster B2430 master 20inch monitor. I can only use the DVI-VGA adapter.

Cheers
ShadowDan