Transfer TC Time Machine Backups to External! Update: Problem with mounting :(

I just wanted to share my experience and hopefully answer any questions people may have about doing this:

I purchased a 1.5TB HDD and external enclosure to increase the backup size of my 500GB TC, and not wanting to start my backups from scratch I tried copying the sparsebundles to the new drive. To my surprise, I was able to switch my TM source disk to the new drive and the backups picked up where they left off! It proceeded to do an incremental backup, and after it was done I went into Time Machine and could see all the backups from the beginning! Now I can use my TC's internal as storage and keep the external for backups. Hope this helps anyone looking to increase the size of their backups without starting fresh...

 

Of course, I just had to go and jinx myself... Now I'm having issues with the drive automatically mounting for Time Machine backups

A bit of information about this, it's a Seagate Barracuda 1.5TB drive in a Velocity 3.5" SATA to eSATA/USB enclosure. It's formatted HFS+ and when I mount it manually, everything is perfect. However, I've noticed that when it's not mounted in Finder and goes to sleep, TM is unable to wake it up when doing an incremental backup. It sounds like it's starting up, then spins down, and TM blurts out an exclamation mark saying the backup is delayed I've also noticed that during large backups, it likes to freeze midway unless I manually mount and unmount it in Finder.

I'm also having issues with Windows XP. The drive is mapped, yet when I open it in Explorer, it doesn't even spin up or attempt to access it. It just spits out either an empty Explorer window, or shows the last items that were in the root directory the last time it was mounted and I opened Explorer. BTW, I was only able to ever successfully mount it when it was mounted in Finder on my Mac.

Anybody have any experience with this? Anybody have any suggestions? I really don't want to open up my TC as I don't want to void the warranty, but it seems that's the only way I can get this infernal drive to work with my setup...

TIA

skorpien