Backing Up Hard Drive to Maxtor

[tbear1]

You can see in another thread that my HD took a dive over the weekend. I have a Maxtor 3200 external hard drive that I would like to set up for back-ups. I have one machine on Leopard and one on Tiger. There are no instructions with the drive other than how to assemble.
My machine sees the drive, but I can't copy anything on to it. What do I need to do to get it going? I would like to partition the drive so I can back up my desktop and laptop.

Thanks.

 

[tbear1]

This seemed to work for me. In case it matter's, I did this on the Tiger Machine.
1. Went into disk utility (applications-->utilities-->disk Utilities.
2. Selected the erase tab and erased the drive using os extended journaled format.
3. Selected the partition tab and partitioned the drive into two sections for my two machines using os extended journaled.

I was able to copy over all of my files onto the drive now. I haven't tried this on the Leopard machine. I will have to do it tomorrow.