How do i reformat a external hard drive and how do i partition a drive?

hi,
i have a seagate free agent desk 1.5 tb external harddrive! i have the back up software installed on the home pc. i have a macbook now! so i still want to be able to use the pc for photos and stuff because if i were to transfer everything onto the macbook i wouldnt have much room to spare. so the pictures are all on the pc.
this is my problem: i have a pc and a mac that both need a external harddrive for backing up things. so i was going to set up time machine, but it said i need to use a different format so i need to re-format the drive, into a format that is mac and windows readable. is there any format that allows me to do that? the drive is currently in nfts format!
i was thinking that if i partioned the drive i could format one side mac and the other nfts! does anyone know if this is possible? i need to find out! i have a dell windows xp sp3 i have a macbook osx10.6.8. does anyone have any step by step steps? in order for time machine to work i have to reformat everything (witch will delete every thing on my external harddrive). so is it possible to reformat the other side to nfts? i was thinking i would do the reformate/partion on the mac. can you do it on the mac? or the pc? for free?
thanks all your help would be nice because i dont want to call apple because i am past the 90 support.
austin

Item #5 of this post implies that Time Machine is happiest with a drive with a "partition map scheme" of either APM or GUID. I'm not sure if either of those is compatible with NTFS. It might be better just to get another disk drive.

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"Thinking of reformatting it back to be used to Mac and Windows. And not use it again with Time Machine"
If you want to format the External drive as universally compatible, your best bet is to format it as exFAT. Note that reformatting the drive erases all contents of the drive.
1) Open Disk Utility located in /Applications/Utilities/ (or simply type it in spotlight and the application will show up)
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Welcome to the Apple Support Communities
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Tirrel wrote:
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Hi rubenrodz;
May I welcome you to the Apple Discussion Forums.
Just be aware that while FAT32 can be used for both the Mac and the PC, it does have limitations. You can't have files larger then 4 GB. Plus FAT32 doesn't keep all of the Mac files.
If you are only going to use the disk on the Mac if would be better to format it as HFS+, the native Mac format.
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Regards
TD

How do i reformat a external hard drive and how do i partition a drive?

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