Time Machine and Hard Drive

[zoeh2004]

I bought a external hard drive and plugged this into the mac to create a back up using time machine. (I don't really know how to use time machine but it did everything automatically and quickly).

I then tried plugging the hard drive into a Windows computer and it was not able to recognise that I had even plugged the hard drive in.

I have removed all the files from the hard drive and put them back onto the MacBook. The hard drive is completely empty however time machine has formatted the hard drive in such a way that I still cant plug it into a windows computer.

I want to re-set the hard drive so that I can manually add the files I need so that I am able to work between windows and my MacBook.

Please can somebody advise on the quickest way to re-set the hard drive.....there's nothing on the hard drive at the moment.

 

[gr8tfly]

A Time Machine drive must be formatted for the Mac (Mac Extended (journaled)), so you would need 3rd party Windows software to access the drive [from Windows].

Another option would be to add a second partition sized for your Windows needs, and format it exFAT, which Mac OS X can read and write to. You can add a partition on-the-fly using Disk Utility.

(Note: for Time Machine, it's also recommended to use the GUID partition table scheme, which can be set using the Option... button on the Disk Utility Partiton tab. You can only change schemes if you re-partion the drive, i.e. erase old partition and create a new one.)

 

[ZVH]

Some of those "Windows adapter" software drivers tend to be a little sketchy, at least historically. Seagate has some type of NTFS/HFS drive(s) that can supposedly be swapped from one type of system to another.

If it was me I would just dedicate the backup drive to the Mac and get/use some other means to do shared drive stuff...maybe something like an external drive with a wireless interface.