Can I drag and drop entire hard drive into and external hard drive?

I want to back up my MacBook Pro before I send it in for optical drive replacement. However, the Time Machine back up app wants me to erase my external drive and reformat before it can back up my files. I already have information from other computers on the external drive, so erasing and restoring is out of the question.
Can I just drag and drop my hard drives (Macintosh HD and BOOTCAMP) into the external hard drive?
Will that transfer everything?
As a side note, can anyone tell me why Time Machine doesn't work with the external drive? My dad has files on it from his Mac and I have a couple movies saved on it from this one. Is it possible to maybe partition the external drive to accommodate both and reformat only one partition without losing the other saved files?

Hi
+"So does reformatting make the external hard drive only usable by Macs/Time Machine?"+
Not really. If the external drive is formatted as FAT32 you can read/write to that drive from any Mac as well as any PC. If the external drive is formatted as NTFS you can only read from it but you can read/write from any PC. You can write to an NTFS formatted volume if you use a 3rd-Party Utility such as MacFuse. If the drive is formatted as Mac OS Extended you can read/write to it from any Mac. Unless you install a 3rd-Party Utility (I don't know of any offhand) you won't be able to read/write to it from any PC. PCs don't know what a Mac OS Extended format is.
As already mentioned TimeMachine will not work with any other format other than Mac OS Extended.
+"Will I be able to use the same external hard drive to back up multiple Mac computers with Time Machine?"+
Yes but only if that external drive has been formatted as Mac OS Extended. If there is existing data on that drive that you don't want to lose back it up first.
+"Will I still be able to drag and drop movies into the external hard drive for basic storage?"+
If you leave the external drive exactly as it is - ie no formatting - and you have already drag/dropped files to it from your mac or any other mac then you will be able to continue to do this.
Tony

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