External HD, advice on formatting and partitioning

[-tWv-]

I just bought a Western Digital My Book 1TB External HD. This drive has around 930gb of usable space and currently formatted as FAT. I plan to use this with time machine and also to be able to store movies and be able to use them cross platform, between windows and osx. I have ntfs 3-g and I was planning on formatted the larger partition to be used with time machine and the smaller one as NTFS to be used cross platform.

My question is: Is my plan stated above the best way to do this? And also, what format does the larger partition need to be to be used with time machine? I just don't want to screw up my hard drive right after I got it. Any advice on how to partition this and what formats needed to be used would be great. Thanks in advance.

 

[MacDawg]

Format the Time Machine as HFS+ which is Mac OS Extended (Journaled) in Disk Utility

Format the Cross Platform any way you want really

FAT32 is read/write by both, but files are limited to 4 GB
NTFS - use NTFS-3G to access from the Mac
HFS+ - use MacDrive to access from Windows

Woof, Woof - Dawg

 

[-tWv-]

Ok i just tried to format it as mac osx extended (journaled) and it said that there was a disk file system error. And so now i formatted it back to FAT. That worked fine. After it says there was an error the disk became unusable.

Now i tried selecting it as a time machine backup and reformatting it with time machine and that worked fine. So something must have happened with disk utility, but I don't know what.

 

[-tWv-]

Ok I have it partitioned into two partitions, what would be the best way to make it ntfs? Should I format it with Disk Utility as FAT and then plug it into a windows machine and format it as ntfs? Or can I do it with disk utility if i have ntfs-3g installed?