External hard Drive not working with time machine?

[macntings]

Hi there,

I have bought a Seagate expansion portable drive to complete backups using the time machine. For some reason when I try to start a backup using the time machine it fails to do so and I get a message saying:

"The backup disk is not in MAC OS Extended (Journaled) format, which is required.

Open time machine preferences and select a different backup disk"

Does anyone know what I'm supposed to do?

I am using a Macbook pro OSX 10.8.5. 2.5 GHz, 4Gb ram...

I would appreciate your help.

Thanks

 

[Julien]

It's probably formatted FAT (as bought) and you need to format as OS Extended (Journaled). Have you formatted it?

 

[satcomer]

You bought from a company tha STILL formats for Windows computers. So use /Applications/Utilities/Disk Utility.app to format for OS X.

 

[KLinPA]

The external hard drive is probably formatted to work with windows machines. You'll need to use Disk Utility to reformat the external to Mac extended journaled (Mac format) for Time Machine to be able to use it. Disk Utility is built into the Mac's operating system OS X. This article has the steps you need: http://support.apple.com/kb/HT3509 It does say it's for Apeture but it's the same steps for Time Machine.

Once the external hard drive is formatted correctly, Time Machine will be able to see it and start using it for backups.

 

[macntings]

Thanks a lot for your help!