time machine external hard drive

[9ozzy9]

I am currently trying to back up my macbook on my Maxtor external hard drive. I already have lots of movies and other files on there which I want to keep. I put these files onto it from my previous windows computer and also formatted my hard drive to fit windows. Is there any way I can use this disk for time machine but keep all of my existing files? I have heard things about partitions, could this be the solution and how do I create them?

 

[wrldwzrd89]

Unfortunately, if the drive is partitioned with MBR (which it most likely will be, if it's set up for Windows use), Mac OS X won't let you modify the partition map without erasing the whole disk. There may be 3rd-party software to fill this need that I don't know about, though.

 

[9ozzy9]

If I copied all of the files on the HD to my macbook then preformed the back up would that work? Also, will it slow down my macbook as I filled my previous internal hard drive to the brim and it crawled.
PS thanks for the quick reply

 

[wrldwzrd89]

Not without some additional work. Unfortunately, Mac OS X requires a GPT partition scheme and HFS+ file system on the Time Machine drive, which makes the drive impossible to use with Windows without 3rd party software like MacDrive. You're going to have to reformat the drive to use it with TM anyway - why not copy all the data, reformat the drive into 2 partitions (both HFS+, and use the GPT partition scheme - all this is done in Disk Utility), then copy everything back.

 

[9ozzy9]

Ok thanks very much I will do that