How to best partition an external drive for my purposes?

Hello, please help,
I've just bought a Western Digital 'My Passport' 320Gb USB (no firewire) portable external harddrive for backing up my data prior to iMac repair.
I also plan to totally wipe my PPC iMac and reinstall it with Leopard.
I erased the external HD, zeroing out the data from it's previous owner, and reformatted it as Mac OS Extended (not journaled).
Now I realise that it might be even more useful than I'd imagined.
I'd now like to partition it so I can use Carbon Copy Cloner to create a bootable copy of my entire iMac while using the rest of the drive as a separate partition for just backing up data.
Ideally I want to be able to use the drive on both Intel and PPC Macs and even PCs, is this possible? How should I format the drive to achieve this?
I've heard I should format it as Mac OS Extended (Journaled) HFS+, what ever that is
I'm currently running OS 10.4.11 but plan to buy Leopard and install that after the wipe.

17" 1.9Ghz iMac G5 (iSight)
I've just bought a Western Digital 'My Passport' 320Gb USB (no firewire)
I'd now like to partition it so I can use Carbon Copy Cloner to create a bootable copy of my entire iMac while using the rest of the drive as a separate partition for just backing up data.
Ideally I want to be able to use the drive on both Intel and PPC Macs and even PCs, is this possible? How should I format the drive to achieve this?
For what you want to do, there is a mismatch between your PPC computer and the external drive that you bought.
With a few exceptions, a PPC Mac requires a firewire external drive for booting and will not boot from a USB drive, regardless of which OS is installed and regardless of the partition scheme and volume format on the drive. I also have an iMac G5, and mine will not boot from USB.
If you do exchange your drive for a firewire drive, do not get another Western Digital model to use with your G5 - many external WD firewire drives will not boot a PPC mac. See [this page|http://wdc.custhelp.com/cgi-bin/wdc.cfg/php/enduser/stdadp.php?pfaqid=1787]
If you want to keep your present USB drive, you can still partition it with one partition for a backup clone and another for "other stuff". With respect to immediate use for recovering your stuff after a clean Leopard install on the HD, I think that Migration Assistant will still work, though I haven't tried this. As for the future, the problems with a clone not being bootable are 1) You can't test it to see if it works OK, and 2) If you do need to restore from it you'd need to boot from "somewhere else" - I think you could boot from an install disk and use Disk Utility's Restore feature to clone it back.
With regard to PC access, a PPC mac normally requires an Apple Partition Map partition scheme on the drive for booting, and such a scheme does not allow for the FAT32 volume format that is readable by PCs. However in this case since your PPC mac can't boot from it anyway, you could partition the drive as GUID. This would allow the main volume to be formatted as Mac OS Extended (Journaled) for the nonbootable clone, and would allow the extra volume to be formatted as FAT32. If you eventually got an Intel Mac, a clone from it to the main volume would also then be bootable.
But what I would do, if feasible, is exchange the USB drive and get a non-WD firewire drive instead.
Message was edited by: jsd2

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