Time Mahine and External Hard Drives

Time Machine and External Hard Drives

External hard drives and I do not get along. I just got a new external HD because I realized my old one was too small. I plug it in my PC (XP) to make sure it's working and it does. I decide to wait to back up my backup my PC because I know Time Machine requires you to delete everything on it anyway. So today I set up time machine and all that. Very easy but took a little bit of time. I go to plug it back into my PC and it no longer works. I hear the external HD spinning and the light turns on, but nothing is popping up in "my computer". I know I have enough power because it's plugged into an outlet.

I got to Disk Management and this is how it looks:



I'm convinced this has something to do with the Time Machine back up. It was working fine yesterday and it says that "GPT Protective Partition" thing. I have a feeling that's what is keeping it from showing up.

Please help, thank you very much.

Edit: Just to clarify, I have a desktop PC that's XP and a Macbook.

Hi

I'm not 100% sure (actually, i'm fairly clueless), but If the drive was formatted by Mac OS, Windows won't be able to see it.

If it was formatted by Windows, Mac OS would be able to read from it, but not write.

At least, that's how I understand things are.

I am not entirely sure how Time Machine partions the drive, but it seems like it has formatted it in a way that is not PC compatible.

On your mac, right click the drive and click get info - screenshot and post the window that appears.

To get this working you need to partition the drive use Disk Utility its the easiest way imho and with it partitioned it allows fr some of the drive to be in time machine format and the other bit in windows format.

You have to partition in order to use both as both backups reqire different code to be run.

Hope that helped

Sorry, was totally wrong with what I wrote previously. I'd plug the drive into your Mac, partition in, one side Mac OS Journalled, one side FAT32. Then Time Machine can back up to one partition (which will also stop it filling the whole drive) and Windows can back up to the other, and you could still use the FAT32 partition to share/move files between the two.

****in yes, thank you. Sorry if I'm not allowed to curse. Used disc utility and did what you said, it was so simple. Just a few more random questions.

If I ever wanted to remove a partition, would the only way be to reformat the HD?

And is there any way to choose how often Time Machine backs up your crap? I like the security but I really don't need it that often.

Thanks everyone.