Setting up external HD to as bootable osx Leopard and back up for Leopard and Vista

[coopdevillan]

I recently bought a 1 TB external HD to put mainly media pics,music,movies etc. onto. I now have my original 200 GB external to use as a back up drive. I would like to use this drive to back up both my mac and my pc. I wolud like to partition this 200 GB drive and manually back up my pc to it, then I would like to be able to have a bootable copy of my Leopard on it while letting time machine do its regular back ups. Can someone please help me configure this. I have a mac book pro intel running Leopard.

[skorpien]

My guess is create 3 partitions. Two HFS+, one NTFS (FAT32 if you want to use the Windows partition with the Mac). Then use one HFS+ partition to install a copy of Leopard, the other will be your Time Machine backup drive, and the NTFS partition will be your Windows backup. The reason I suggest two HFS+ partitions is that you probably wouldn't want to be backing up using Time Machine onto your bootable partition (though technically you can).

[coopdevillan]

What would be the reason I wouldn't want to back up Time Machine to my bootable partition ?

[wizzracer]

I thought you had to have firewire to make a bootable drive on OSX. Did they change that with the Intel systems?

[coopdevillan]

No I installed my Leopard through a 2.0 connection.

[dukebound85]

I thought you had to have firewire to make a bootable drive on OSX. Did they change that with the Intel systems?

you can use usb 2.0 drives

[skorpien]

What would be the reason I wouldn't want to back up Time Machine to my bootable partition ?

I guess there'd be really no need to. Like I said, technically you can use the same partition for your bootable partition and Time Machine backups. I would just rather keep them separate. Say you needed to wipe one or the other for whatever reason. If they are two distinct partitions, it makes things a lot easier. Just make the bootable partition the minimum size required to install OS X and you should be fine (ie, no extra space is lost due to it not being used on that partition). I doubt you'd be wanting to install any programs on the bootable drive anyway (assuming it's for troubleshooting purposes only).

[coopdevillan]

I would agree thank you for your reply : )

[coopdevillan]

Oooook so I partitioned my 200 GB into 3 sections, 4 if you count the small
"free" space partition. I used "ipartition" and broke it down into a 115 GB partition for Time Machine, a 8.55 partition for a boot of osx 10.5, and a remaining partition for Vista in NTSF format. Now the two osx partitions are cool but when I plug the Vista one in my PC does not read it. Can some one throw a theory my way ?:apple: