2 Qs - Time machine, Startup image

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1 - I've got a 500gb external hard drive I already use with a pc for backup purposes that has more than enough room to backup my macbook pro drive as well.

Is there no way getting around the HPF formatted requirement to use Time Machine? The drive is currently formatted as NTFS. I'd like to devote half the drive to the PC, half to the mac, without buying a new drive for TM.

2 - I changed the default startup image, no problem, but when I use an external monitor, the default space image from Apple is the background on the external monitor - how do I change it?

Thanks in advance.
 
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1- You could partition your drive into two parts and then format half of it, and then you could certainly use half for PC, and half for OSX. You can do this using Disk Utility, a preinstalled app in OSX. This is what it looks like:
And selecting your partition size and partitioning with Disk Utility will erase everything I do believe. You can do this with terminal I think, and here is how, but I do not know if a complete reformat is necessary then.

Question 2!

I've not had much experience with external monitors, but have you just tried a simple image change with system prefs? Does it automatically reset to the default space image everytime?
 
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1 - I'm fuzzy on the pc side. If I make both partitions via disk utility, I format the pc partition using some pc disk utility, right?

2 - I went into sys pref and with the ext monitor attached, there's an extra settings window on the ext. Done. Too used to Windows/Linux, always looking for some non-obvious way to do something.

Thanks.
 

Slydude

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Here's an explanation that might clear up a few things. Create an HFS+/NTFS/FAT32 external drive - Mac OS X Hints. Obviously you could avoid the FAT 32 partition unless you have a need for this. I suggest reading all of the comments. If I remember correctly one of the comments suggests an easier procedure.

Back up your data before trying this. I don't think there was a way mentioned to recreate the partitions without trashing data. I tried the earlier version of this hint a while ago and it seemed to work OK although I sometimes had too manually mount the HFS+ partition. Haven't tried this hint yet.
 

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