How can I backup my MAC & Windows machine to the same 1TB USB Hard Drive?

[leedmellow]

Hi All,

I have searched the forum for this but I can't find anything so sorry if it has already been asked.

I have a Macbook Pro OSX 10.5 and a Windows XP SP3 machine.

I would like to backup my Mac using Time Machine to a 1TB USB Hard Drive, I would also like to backup my Windows XP Machine to the same drive (I'll probably use Acronis or something similar for Windows)

Is this possible? Will the Mac still backup ok?

Do I just need to create 2 Partitions on the drive?

If so, what filesystem should it be?

Sorry I'm very new to Mac.

Thanks in advance.
Lee

 

[scottness]

Hi Lee, I would use 2 partitions. One in Mac OS Extended and the other for Windows (FAT)

 

[leedmellow]

Hi Lee, I would use 2 partitions. One in Mac OS Extended and the other for Windows (FAT)

Hi thanks mate I'll give that a go and post back here with the result.

Thanks for the fast response

 

[leedmellow]

stuggling...

Hey,

I have used Seagate DiscWizard to create the following partitions:

300.5 GB FAT32 Label: XP Backup
331 GB FAT32 Label: NAS Backup
300.5 FAT32 Label: Time Machin

All can be read and used in XP

I then plug the drive in to my macbook, go to time machine, tell it to use Time Machin as the backup drive, it then trys to format it and dismounts the drive.

I then have to take the USB cable out and back in, once it picks up the drive its trashed the Time Machin partition and doesnt show up in Time Machine adn when using Disk Utility its renamed it to 'disk3s7'

You now cant mount the disk and reformatting it fails.

I've tried this with a 100gb partition for MAC also but it doesnt work.

Am I doing something wrong?

 

[leedmellow]

Solved!!

Get in!

Heres what I did:

Deleted all partitions.

Using Mac OSX created a MAC Extended Partition of 300gb using Disk Utility choosing the MBR Setting.

Then plugged into XP, created an Extended Partition of 600GB

Then created 2 Logical Partitions for 300gb each (only option for file system is NTFS)

Plugged back in to the Mac and it now sees all the partitions most importantly the MAC Extended one so I can use Time Machine.

Plugged back in to XP still sees the 2 partitions so I can use it to backup my XP machine and my NAS box.