Can I use the hard drive for other stuff once I've Time Machined it?

Firstly, apologies if these questions have been answered elsewhere. I have searched but feel I need a post in its own right.
I've bought a new 1TB Western Digital 'My Passport' hard drive. I've plugged it in and it is busy creating a time machine back up right now. It is going to use about 60GB once done.
Will I be able to use the remaining 940GB when it's finished backing up?
Will my HD behave just like a regular USB storage device after this?
Will it work with my windows PC as well?
I have an older, smaller HD drive with backups of all my pictures/docs/music on. Can I easily transfer those onto my new hard drive?
Many thanks in advance for any answers that may be forthcoming.

dughall wrote:
Will I be able to use the remaining 940GB when it's finished backing up?
Yes. However, this is not recommended. Time Machine makes duplicates of your entire system. Each identical file is only on disk once, but there can be many, many file and directory pointers. If you ever want to blow away your Time Machine drive and start a fresh one, it will take forever and then some to delete all those files. It is far easier to just erase the partition. If you have other files on there, you have to remember to move them elsewhere before erasing the partition.
I suggest giving Time Machine a 500 GB partition and using 500 GB for yourself.
Will my HD behave just like a regular USB storage device after this?
Yep
Will it work with my windows PC as well?
Only if you format the other partition as FAT or NTFS. There may be software you can get to make Windows understand the Mac HFS+ format, but I wouldn't want Windows near my Time Machine drive. Be aware that if you format as FAT, you may have trouble writing some Mac files to the volume.
I have an older, smaller HD drive with backups of all my pictures/docs/music on. Can I easily transfer those onto my new hard drive?
Time Machine backups? In theory you probably could, but it wouldn't be worth the effort. Just copy those to your other partition.

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