Time Machine Question

When I try to back up with Time Machine it asks me for if I want to save it on my External HD....and then it says it has to Erase everything on my external before I can do it.

Obviously I don't want to erase everything on my external HD...so what am I supposed to do? It says to reformat it as well, but I don't know how to do it.

Thanks!

You do this through Disk Utility which is found in the Utilities folder. Reformatting will erase everything on the drive. If you have enough space on the drive you try making a partition of the drive which should leave the remainder of your stored items in tact. This did not happen on my external drive when I first used Time Machine, so I am not sure why it has happened to you. Could perhaps be the way the drive was formatted in the first place is causing it.

so i will figure out how to partition my HD? I have a Lacie external HD. I just don't want to take the chance of losing everything on it....that is where I have all my music backed up.

The hard drive might have been formatted with an incompatible file system.

Time Machine will only accept an HFS formatted drive. What type of partition does your drive have? Do a Command+I (Get Info) on it and let us know...

you can make partition by using "diskutil resizevolume" option. It doesnt erase any data on the disk. But if you're not familiar with the CLI of Linux/Unix, then don't try it.

CLI not needed. Leopard's Disk Utility does live partitioning.