Is there risk in partitioning an external HD that has existing files on it?

I have a 1TB external hard drive which has a lot of movies, songs and photos, etc. which I don't have backups for. The hard drive has 500GB left, and I want to make a partition of 400GB for Time Machine. I have heard that if you make a partition on an external hard drive, everything will be wiped, which would be a disaster. Is this true? Has anyone had any experience with this?
Thank you.
James.

if you really reformat the drive this will completely wipe it, yes. there is also a procedure for splitting an existing partition in two. that will not wipe it. enter "create new volumes' in Disk utility Help to see how. but it will almost certainly not work if you only have 500GB free space on the drive and want to make a 400GB partition. disk utility needs a single contiguous piece of free space to make a new partition and it's extremely unlikely there is one now due to disk fragmentation. but more importantly. ANY partitioning operation can fail and should not be attempted without a backup. furthermore. you plan appears to be a very poor one to me even if it works. you have a lot of data that's not backed up and you want to make a TM partition on the same drive with all that data?? the data in the non TM partition will still not be backed up. if something happens to the drive you'll loos EVERYTHING on it. I suggest you get another drive and use it to back up the data on this one and on your main internal drive.

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