Do I need a dedicated hard drive?

I have a 320GB Firewire Seagate HD with some important files on it, but I would like to use it as my Time Machine drive as well (plenty of space). Question is: will TM erase things on the drive when I first use it? Will it format the drive in some way?
I hear I can put things on the drive AFTER I am using TM, but the important thing for me is to know if I can leave them on the drive as I backup for the first time.
Hesitant.... a little help?
Bryan

No it starts a TM backup file and just puts it right along your other files. Depending on how much room you have seems to be the limit on how far back the backups can go. I actually have TM using a partition I have a tiger back up in.

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