Another Time Machine Problem

[reas0n]

ok so i just got my new MBP last monday... Leopard came in the mail today i installed all went well....i have had a 500GB western digital external HD for a few months now and have been saving stuff to that instead of my Pcs hard drive as one would imagine i have alot of stuff on there but everytime i try to use it as my backup drive for time machine it tells me i have to erase everything on it...as you prolly already guessed i dont want to loose my stuff...is there any way around this?

 

[Peace]

How is this a Time Machine problem? It looks like a storage problem on your part.

 

[tyr2]

is the drive formatted with HFS+? If it's FAT32 you can't use Time Machine on it without reformatting the drive to HFS+ unfortunately.

 

[reas0n]

i dont know time machine gave me the error....i was wondering if there was a way around it...geeez

 

[elmo151]

how is the western digital disc formated? use disc utility to format as a mac disc. select the disc and click "Erase". it will give you several format choices.


move the contents of the disc to your macintosh; then move it back

 

[reas0n]

is the drive formatted with HFS+? If it's FAT32 you can't use Time Machine on it without reformatting the drive to HFS+ unfortunately.

that sucks...

 

[reas0n]

how is the western digital disc formated? use disc utility to format as a mac disc. select the disc and click "Erase". it will give you several format choices.


move the contents of the disc to your macintosh; then move it back

too much stuff on the drive to move it to here

 

[reas0n]

ok so this is what im planing on doing...i have a PC with 200 spare gigs im transfering everything on the External HD to that(the PC) then im gunna Format the External HD to work with Time Machine then hook the external HD back up to the PC...and then transfer all the crap back on the ExHD...but my question is once i get the External formated ( w/o partition) do you think i will be able to hook the external up to the pc once it is formatted to work with time machine???

 

[CortexRock]

I don't think so. Macs and PCs use different types of formatting on the discs (Macs use HFS+, PCs use FAT32 or NTFS).

Note that PCs can't (easily?) read HFS+ formatted drives, and Macs can read or write to FAT32, or read only from NTFS formatted drives.

If you want the best of both worlds, you'll need to partition your external drive and format one bit as each (HFS+/NTFS) and treat them as two separate drives.

 

[reas0n]

I don't think so. Macs and PCs use different types of formatting on the discs (Macs use HFS+, PCs use FAT32 or NTFS).

Note that PCs can't (easily?) read HFS+ formatted drives, and Macs can read or write to FAT32, or read only from NTFS formatted drives.

If you want the best of both worlds, you'll need to partition your external drive and format one bit as each (HFS+/NTFS) and treat them as two separate drives.

i thought that might have to be done...DAMNIT