Does External HD Need to be Empty/New?

Hi, I have a couple friends who are upgrading to Tiger and interested in the Time Machine feature. They have existing firewire drives that have plenty of space for backing up available.
But I was told that when firing up Time Machine, it wants to reformat the HD before continuing.
- Is this mandatory?
- Is there a setting to allow it to use a directory on a HD, or any other way to use existing HD?
It woud seem silly that everyone would need to get a new or clean HD to use this feature. A lot of folks may have drives already that are perfectly usable.
Would partitioning the drive be the answer? Any way to do this without destroying the data currently on the drive (I know there's apps for doing this on a PC).
Thanks!

+But I was told that when firing up Time Machine, it wants to reformat the HD before continuing.+
If a drive has not been assigned to Time Machine it asks to format any new external. There is a cancel button but I recall two posts saying that Time Machine formatted their drive automatically even when told not to. The posters also reported losing data on those drives when using file recovery software.
+Is this mandatory?+
In most instances, probably yes. Nearly all hard drives ship with FAT32 formatting and very few people who use externals for storage bother to reformat them. A Time Machine disk must be formatted Apple Extended (Journaled) with GUID partitioning for Intel Macs and Apple Partition Map for PPC Macs. If the external drive is correctly formatted and partitioned it can be used without partitioning for Time Machine as well as data storage. However, Apple does not recommend this.
+Any way to do this without destroying the data currently on the drive+
There are third party utilities that claim to be able to do this but it would be insanely unwise to attempt it without the data on the drive being backed up and tested. Also, I would seriously doubt this would work unless the drive had the correct partition scheme on it for Time Machine.

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