I am using a 500GB external HDD ( formatted in Mac OS Extended - Journaled ) to back up my iMac with SuperDuper , the backup only takes up a small amount of space on the external HDD , and the rest of the empty space is not used. I now would like to use the un used spare space on my external HDD to backup my sisters laptop which is running windows xp, is there any way I could do this with out loosing the iMac clone copy already on the external HDD, any ideas of how to go about this Please.
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Can I use my Ext iMac HDD to back up wxp ?
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As said, you can add partitions using Disk Utility without reformatting, but this may not work in your situation.
If your drive has an APM partition scheme, then I'm pretty sure Windows XP won't recognize it even if you make a FAT (aka DOS) partition on it. MBR will work with both Mac and Windows; not sure about GUID, but I'm guessing not XP.
If you add a partition it's easy enough to check--plug it into the XP machine; if it shows up, it was already MBR (which if you just reformatted it when you got it may the case--external drives, if preformatted, usually come as MBR with a single FAT partition). If not, you're going to have to completely erase it, reformat as two partitions with MBR scheme (it's under the "options" button in Disk Utility's "Partition" tab), and re-copy your files to the Mac partition.
If your drive has an APM partition scheme, then I'm pretty sure Windows XP won't recognize it even if you make a FAT (aka DOS) partition on it. MBR will work with both Mac and Windows; not sure about GUID, but I'm guessing not XP.
If you add a partition it's easy enough to check--plug it into the XP machine; if it shows up, it was already MBR (which if you just reformatted it when you got it may the case--external drives, if preformatted, usually come as MBR with a single FAT partition). If not, you're going to have to completely erase it, reformat as two partitions with MBR scheme (it's under the "options" button in Disk Utility's "Partition" tab), and re-copy your files to the Mac partition.
To my understanding, while you can have a drive partitioned to multiple formats, it only has one partition scheme. So, every Intel Mac running BootCamp is running a FAT partition and a HFS+ volume under GUID.
So yeah, you can't backup your Windows laptop to the same external device that's formatted as HFS. You'll need to run Disk Utility so you can make another partition that would be readable by the Windows laptop (MS-DOS format through DU).
This is true, but the OP is talking about an external drive, so there's no easy way to guess what partition scheme it's using. It's possible that it shipped formatted MBR with a single FAT partition (most retail boxed drives do) and that said partition was just replaced by an HFS partition without changing the partition scheme. In which case on-the-fly repartitioning should work (at least, should if Disk Utility can DO on-the-fly repartitioning on an MBR drive, which I've never tried).
No guarantee, but it doesn't hurt to try. Incidentally, to check what partition scheme the drive is using, open Disk Utility, find the least-indented item related to the drive you're interested in in the left pane, and click on it--the info area at the bottom of the window should show the Partition Map Scheme at the bottom right.
That's true, however, with Disk Utility you can select the drive and at the bottom it will display the partition table with MBR or GUID, etc., but you have to select the drive itself, i.e., 250GB HD TOSHIBA, as opposed to the partition below it "Macintosh HD" in the source menu in DU.