External harddisk not working on windows, what can i do?

I am a new Mac user and cannot seem to get it with the external harddrives. I bought one that is supposed to be working with both windows and mac but after installing time machine (which formatted it in a non windows way i guess) it is not readable by windows. I have browsed several articles but have no idea what to do. Would it help to part it in 2 and use one part for time machine while formatting the other one to fit with windows? Would that work? I want to be able to have time machine but also randomly being able to copy music from friends with pc:s. Other people seem to be complaining after doing that (parting) mac could not read the stuff from windows. aaaargh help!!What to do???

TimeMachine requires either an entire drive or it's own dedicated partition. It will basically continue to backup revisions until it fills either the entire drive or partition (if you have created a partition for it). Your suggestion for creating multiple partitions is fine. You can let TimeMachine use one and the other can be for whatever you want. Only FAT32 formatted drives/partitions are compatible for writing with both Macs and PCs. If you want to be able to use the data partition on both platforms, you should format it as FAT32 (I believe the partition utility in Disk Utility just calls it DOS). There is a limit however for FAT32. The largest single file that you can have is 4GB. This is generally not a problem for most people, but if you'll be working with large data files or videos, it is something to consider. If you expect to be working with files over 4GB, the external data partition will need to be formatted in either NTFS or OS X. Unfortunately, Windows can neither read nor write to an OS X formatted drive and OS X can read, but not write to an NTFS drive. There are utilites available for both OS X and Windows that will allow them to write to the opposite format. Again, this is only an issue if you plan to be working with really large files.... otherwise, FAT32 will be fine and is compatible with both platforms.

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