TIME Machine Question!!!

For Time Machine to work, you need a partition formatted as HFS+

 

There's no "Safe" way to do it, but if you are willing to take a bit of risk, you can theoretically do this:

1) Resize your existing filesystem -- this is complicated enough that I can't explain it here. You'll want to search google based on the type of filesystem that already exists on the drive. For example, if the drive is FAT32, then google for "resize fat32 partition" and find some decent instructions.

2) AFter you resize the file system, you can shrink the partition to match it, which will free up space on your drive.

3) Create a new partition in the free space.

4) Format the new partition as HFS+

 

It cannot be done. Doesn't work that way. Formatting by nature destroys everything on the disk. Consider a different, dedicated drive for TM maybe? Or copy that stuff elsewhere (DVDs?) and reformat.

 

You could make a new partition like savar recommended, or you could try to find a way into letting Time Machine backup on a NTFS (or whatever it is) volume. But I would just partition it (half NTFS and half HSF+) and then move the files from the old partition to the new one. Then delete the old empty partition. - Reformatting a chunk at a time.