Help with re formating external drive

Help,
I can not figure this out. I have a yellow exclamation point on my xternal drive in imovie and was told i needed to reformat it to HFS + journaled. It is currently Afat. I have been told to erase it and change the format which I have done but I don't think it has worked. I have partioned it but I don't know what and how to do it. I really don't know how to use disk utility.
Help please.
I have a western digital external hard drive. Thanks.

See the built-in Help.
Try One Partition with Mac OS Extended (HFS+) Journaled format. If you have trouble doing this yourself, maybe find a local Apple Store or Apple/Mac User Group and have someone help you. Or date a computer geek for a week, get him to do it, then dump him.
If you have already gone through the process, what is happening now that makes you think that the drive is not working properly? Does iMovie still complain about the drive format? Can you actually copy data to the drive and it works as expected? What does Apple System Profiler report about the drive? (under the Apple Menu, select About this Mac, then click the More Info button, expand the little triangles to show info about hardware and volumes, etc.)
(Not sure if this is an issue, not sure if I should even mention it, but Western Digital drives don't always seem to work that great with the Mac, hard to say if that's anything related to your issues, just search the forums for WD or Western Digital to see what other user experiences have been. I'm sure there may be some who are really happy with them too. You might be able to store photo/movie data on the drive just fine, but you might not be able to boot the Mac OS X from it, for example.)

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Help with partitioning an external drive

I've never done this, so am not sure how it works. I have an external drive (250 gb) that I use with SuperDuper to back up my Mac. Now I have decided I also want to keep a separate iTunes library on this drive. Apparently, so that SuperDuper doesn't erase the new iTunes library, the drive will need to be partitioned.
So. . . I will use Disk Utility to partition that drive into two and call each section something different? Will each section then look like a different drive (for instance, in SuperDuper)?
Are there any tricks or tips I should know before running Disk Utility's partition application?
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Powerbook G4; Intel iMac 20inch Core Duo Mac OS X (10.4.7)

Disk Utility offers following partition schemes:
GUID -> Intel Mac
Apple Partition Map (APM) -> PPC Mac
Master Boot Record (MBR) -> PC
My apology for referring APM as PPC in my previous post. Native partition scheme (GUID for Intel Mac and APM for PPC Mac) must be used in order to install Mac OS X in the partition as startup disk, it allows booting as well as firmware update. If partition must be shared between Intel Mac and PPC Mac, then only APM scheme can be used since both Mac platforms are able to access APM partition but only PPC Mac can boot from this type of partition.
Since I have only one Intel Mac and booting from external storage is necessary for maintenance (full defragmentation) and repair (in case when internal drive has crashed), I use only GUID scheme for iMac's internal drive and Firewire external drive. Super Duper is used to mirror exactly internal drive to external drive regularly. The only time I have to perform file transfer between PPC Mac and Intel Mac with external drive was during hardware upgrade as follows:
iBook G4 -> iMac G5 -> iMac CoreDuo -> iMac Core2Duo
Thus the decision for partition scheme of external drive depends on whether you have to boot Mac OS X from external drive (no in your case but highly recommeded for emergency plan) and whether sharing of external drive between your PowerBook G4 and iMac CoreDuo is desirable. I assume you will select APM scheme for your purpose since booting Mac OS X from external drive is not required.
Use of very old Master Boot Record (MBR) scheme will turn the external drive into PC drive completely. Unless this drive must be accessed in Windows environment as conventional PC drive for some PC disk utilities (these old utilities can't work with new GUID scheme), use of this non-native scheme for Mac OS X is not advisable.
Hopefully above information will help you in partitioning external drive. Since you do not have to preserve content of this external drive, why not go ahead and experiment with new partitions to see whether they serve your purpose ? Disk partitioning without writing zero or any random patterns on whole disk takes only few seconds. But it is a good idea to write zero (shortest time required) across whole disk surface to ensure that bad disk blocks are masked off to prevent future access and possible crash.
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If I understand your goal correctly, you're considering using Time Machine as external storage, and it doesn't work that way. Time Machine keeps around what it can, and older stuff gets flushed as the storage available to Time Machine reaches its lower threshold due to the addition of newer stuff. When the older stuff gets flushed is not predictable.
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Message was edited by: Fortuny

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I just bought a Seagate 1tb external drive from OWC and I want to partition it into a HFS+ (journaled I assume) volume and a NTFS volume. Objective: To manually backup critical folders from my wife’s Dell (running XP) to the NTFS volume and critical Mac folders from my PowerBookG4 to the HFS volume.
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• Both volumes on the new ext. driver were HFS (from my last attempt the other day) so I looked into a simple erase of one partition/volume into a different format, but DU did not offer a way of erasing it into MS-DOS(FAT32). But I think I did a simple HFS erase anyway of the volume I wanted to format to FAT32. There was nothing “in” that volume because this was a new external drive but I figured it could not hurt anything.
• So then, I think I went back to Partition, locked the partition/volume that I wanted to keep in HFS+ for my Mac files, and (re)partitioned the other just erased volume to MS-DOS. I think I did it under the MBR option.
• It worked! Not sure why but my Mac recognized both volumes one as HFS, the other as FAT32. Maybe someone will find this useful some day!!
• Then, I hooked up the drive to my work Dell, the Dell found only the FAT32 drive (as expected), and I executed a short simple easy command I found on ehow.com (search for ‘convert FAT32 to NTFS’) to make that volume NTFS.
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I'm having some odd troubles with using Disk Utility to format an external hard drive. For some reason, it is giving me all sorts of errors and problems.
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!http://img19.imageshack.us/img19/5019/picture2csm.png!
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Cheers.

Wait, scratch that, it suddenly started working again.
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<Edited by Host>

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So virtually 2 different systems being able to operate on the one machine?
yes and yes.
most of the prosumers here keep a pair or at least one clone of every machine they have, theyre priceless tools for recovery from HD crash, and priceless in testing and usefulness.
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its the best fastest way to getting back to 100% quickly after a HD crash, many many advantages.
HD clones
Advantages:
1. HD clones are the best, quickest way to get back to 100% full operation in mere seconds.
2. Once a HD clone is created, the creation software (Carbon Copy Cloner or SuperDuper) is no longer needed whatsoever, and unlike TM, which requires complex software for its operational transference of data, a HD clone is its own bootable entity.
3. HD clones are unconnected and isolated from recent corruption.
4. HD clones allow a “portable copy” of your computer that you can likewise connect to another same Mac and have all your APPS and data at hand, which is extremely useful.
5. Rather than, as many users do, thinking of a HD clone as a “complimentary backup” to the use of TM, a HD clone is superior to TM both in ease of returning to 100% quickly, and its autonomous nature; while each has its place, TM can and does fill the gap in, say, a 2 week old clone. As an analogy, the HD clone itself is the brick wall of protection, whereas TM can be thought of as the mortar, which will fill any cracks in data on a week, 2-week, or 1-month old HD clone.
6. Best-idealized 2nd platform redundancy for data protection, and 1st level for system restore of your computers internal HD. (Time machine being 2nd level for system restore of the computer’s internal HD).
HD cloning software options:
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2. Carbon Copy Cloner APP (will copy the recovery partition as well)
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Help with re formating external drive

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