Need help with external HD.

[Samarium]

Hello everyone, My dad just gave me a spare external HD he had hanging around. Thats great, BUT.. He told me that there are some folders he need for there only for backup, he has a Win Xp machine, so I think that is formatted in another extension not compatible for Mac, or I am wrong? Its 250gb, and I want to use it for Time Machine, and make a Windows partition to run Parallels or Fusion to see if its fast enough to my dad run the only program he is not switching for Mac. So please help me out. I will provide any other information that you ask if I did not supplied it in the above paragraph.


I Only need 3 partitions now(He told me to erase what he had)

I Need one for XP
One for storage(i want to store things from my macbook)
and 1 for Time Machine.

How do i accomplish this?

 

[ChrisA]

Mac OS X will directly read the Windows partitions. Just plug the drive in and it should work. Copy the data to DVD for backup. make two copies. Then use disk utilty to reformat the drive to HFS+

 

[Samarium]

Thanks for the input but i need 3 different partitions.
1 for random storage, drag things in between my macbook and the external hd.

1 for Windows

1 for Time Machine..

I also need to know in what formats i have to leave each partition.