External hard drive and time machine backup question

I had this setup for awhile.

I had a 500gb external with 2 partitions. 1 formatted for OS X and 1 NTFS.

It worked...

 

Open Disk Utility with the drive plugged in. There is a partition tab. It's really not hard to figure out.

 

This was quite a rude response in my opinion; not everybody is technically minded, there is no need to be arrogant about what you might know and what somebody else might not.

Through Disk Utility, select the Hard Drive you want to partition and click on the Partition tab. Then click the drop-down menu and select 2 Partitions. You may resize the two partitions to whichever sizes you like for the backups. You can also rename each partition to whatever you like. Make sure that the Mac backup one is formatted for Mac OS Extended (Journaled) and that the Windows one to FAT. Then apply the changes.

Somebody posted about formatting the Windows one should be NTFS, I'm not sure how something can be formatted as this in OS X, perhaps you would need to do it in Windows? However I hope my instructions help you anyway Good luck!

 

Within OS X you'll want to make 1 partition in FAT 32, then when you plug it into windows format into NTFS. Windows likes NTFS better. and if there are files on the NTFS partition you want to access in OS X you can install Macfuse...

 

Don't use the FAT32 method as it limits your files to 4gb it's really outdated now.
I just bought an external hard drive this weekend i'll tell you how i have done it:

What you do is you make on partition in OS X using disk utility that is in HFS+ (Mac Os Extended) make it 250gb (as you have 500) call it Leopard or whatever, then you will have 2 partitions select one and make it "Blank" or "Free Space" can't remember what it's called and name it Windows or whatever, then you plug your HD to Windows, your HD will not show up in Windows, to see it you will have to into :

Control Panel (Switch to Classic view) -> Administrative Tools -> Computer Management and then click on Disk Management on the left. You will then see your Hard drive partitions now, select the partition you have "Free Spaced" and right click on it and select format, check quick format as there is nothing on your drive anyway, it's gonna take 5 seconds and voila, you will see your drive in the main My Computer, and on OS X you will see both partitions except you won't be able to write in the Windows partition.

I have done the exact steps above with a 640gb external HD and it works perfectly.

Consider installing MacDrive on your Windows computer if you need to write on the OS X partition from Windows and install NTFS-3G if you need to write on the Windows partition from Mac OS X.

Hope this helps

 

Hi, I have a similar problem. I have a 500gb lacie rugged external hard drive and I want to use it with both mac and windows. My only problem is that I have already formatted to my mac and have all my TM backups on it.

I tried what you said, but it didn't work. My HD paritions weren't recognised by windows, even when I went to disk management. It just said there were ~450GB of unallocated space and that it didn't recognise it.

The strange thing though, is that I think windows installed a driver for Lacie because although I couldn't format it/the paritions didn't appear, I could look at it in preferences.

Thanks if anyone can help =/