Time Machine Back-up Drive

[Chrissyrus]

Hi,

Sorry if i am missing something obvious here, I am quite new to Mac been on Windows all my life.

I have used an external drive to back up my MacBook Pro using Time Machine. But since formatting the drive to work with TM i cant seem to get it to appear in Windows, on either of my machines. It will find the drivers and i can safely remove it from the task tray, but its not appearing in my computer.

I have had a look on Google and the forum but cant seem to find much.

Any help will be much appreciated...

Thx

Chris

[Tumbleweed666]

Originally Posted by Chrissyrus

Hi,

Sorry if i am missing something obvious here, I am quite new to Mac been on Windows all my life.

I have used an external drive to back up my MacBook Pro using Time Machine. But since formatting the drive to work with TM i cant seem to get it to appear in Windows, on either of my machines. It will find the drivers and i can safely remove it from the task tray, but its not appearing in my computer.

I have had a look on Google and the forum but cant seem to find much.

Any help will be much appreciated...

Thx

Chris

To use a drive for TM, it needs to be formatted as native Mac, which would have happened when Mac asked 'use this drive for TM?' and you clicked 'OK'. WIndows out of teh box cant read that, you will need to install something like macdrive on your PC, then it will be able to access it.

If you want to use spare capacity on the drive you might be better off partitioning it, one Windows one Mac. I wouldn't recommend accessing the TM files from Windows. In fact, dont do that :-)

[Chrissyrus]

Originally Posted by Tumbleweed666

To use a drive for TM, it needs to be formatted as native Mac, which would have happened when Mac asked 'use this drive for TM?' and you clicked 'OK'. WIndows out of teh box cant read that, you will need to install something like macdrive on your PC, then it will be able to access it.

If you want to use spare capacity on the drive you might be better off partitioning it, one Windows one Mac. I wouldn't recommend accessing the TM files from Windows. In fact, dont do that :-)

Ok thanks for the help. I will have a good look on here tomorrow about mac drive and partitioning.

Thanks

[AppleNewton]

What version of OSX do you have?

Bootcamp 3.0 (which is supplied on the Snow Leopard Disc or if your system came with SL it will be included on there) has native support for Mac formatted drives under Windows.

That way you wont have to install MacDrive which has been flaky with support of Mac formatted drives lately.

The apple site may have the Bootcamp 3.0 drivers or if you run Apple Software Update in Windows it may appear there as well.

[Tumbleweed666]

Originally Posted by AppleNewton

What version of OSX do you have?

Bootcamp 3.0 (which is supplied on the Snow Leopard Disc or if your system came with SL it will be included on there) has native support for Mac formatted drives under Windows.

That way you wont have to install MacDrive which has been flaky with support of Mac formatted drives lately.

The apple site may have the Bootcamp 3.0 drivers or if you run Apple Software Update in Windows it may appear there as well.

To the OP - this is only applicable if you are running Windows on the same system as your Mac. I read your message as you plugging the drive into a separate Win system , is that correct ?

And to AppleNewton - how can Macdrive be flaky 'lately' ?? There haven't been any recent changes to HFS+ AFAIK so why would it become any less reliable than it was in the past?

[Chrissyrus]

Originally Posted by Tumbleweed666

To the OP - this is only applicable if you are running Windows on the same system as your Mac. I read your message as you plugging the drive into a separate Win system , is that correct ?

And to AppleNewton - how can Macdrive be flaky 'lately' ?? There haven't been any recent changes to HFS+ AFAIK so why would it become any less reliable than it was in the past?

Yes I am running 3 separate computers at the moment 2 Windows an one Mac. I want to use the drive to back up the Mac and also so I can move largish amounts of data from one computer to the Mac (Without going through our very slow wireless network). So do you think a partition is the way to go? Split 400GB off for the Mac and 100GB for moving files.

[Tumbleweed666]

Originally Posted by Chrissyrus

Yes I am running 3 separate computers at the moment 2 Windows an one Mac. I want to use the drive to back up the Mac and also so I can move largish amounts of data from one computer to the Mac (Without going through our very slow wireless network). So do you think a partition is the way to go? Split 400GB off for the Mac and 100GB for moving files.

Yes that's what I would do, partition.

NOte that if you are reading and writing to it from both Win and Mac, then FAT will be OK as long as the files are (IIRC) < 4Gb max, larger than that and you'll have to either format the partition as NTFS and add additional s/w on the Mac to manage it, or additional s/w on the PC's to write to NTFS (OSX can read NTFS fine without additional s/w)

[Chrissyrus]

Ok, thanks for the help. I will just have to read up on how to partition now

[Chrissyrus]

Just done the partition using Disk Utility, and i was surprised how easy it was!!


Thx agian

Chris