Time machine questions

[Dingo Dave 69]

I got Leopard on release day and have had it connected to an external drive and time machine running since, with no problems. However, a few days ago I had to reinstall OSX and set everything up again. Now when I open time machine I can still go back to a time prior to reinstalling OSX but some things I cannot restore. For example I can only restore my desktop items from since I reinstalled OSX. However if I click my Macbook icon in the finder I can restore back until January.

What has caused this and is there a way to delete everything from Time machine and start fresh from now?

Thanks guys.

[chscag]

I can't answer why you can restore some items and not others but you can start over with Time Machine by first turning it off. Erase and reformat your external hard drive to HFS+ and turn Time Machine back on. It'll start by making a complete new backup of OS X.

Regards.

[Dingo Dave 69]

Thanks for that. I have managed to delete my old time machine files and start again.

Another question though if anyone can help. The drive I use time machine on is partitioned. I have three partitions on the drive and one is for Time machine. When I click on the options in the time machine preferences it shows that I have selected for the other partitions not to be backed up on time machine, which is fine. However The time machine partition is also shown and is greyed out, is this ok?