Partitioning a disc already in use - for use with Time Machine

I just bought the upgrade to 10.5 Leopard, and I want to use my external disc (LaCie 500GB - a couple of months old) to back up using time-machine. The thing is, I've already been using it to backup manually, and to be sure, I want to keep that possibility.
But when I open TimeMachine, it says it will delete all contents and format my external disc if I want to use it as my TimeMachine-drive. Could I solve this by partitioning it using disc utilities so that, say 150GB's is for TimeMachine and the rest is for manual backup and temporary backup? Or will this delete the other contents I already have on the disc (about 200GB) that I want to keep there?

I had nothing but nightmares with my LaCie 500GB drive and Time Machine. I had it partitioned, and I could never go back to previous backups to restore a file. After finally reformatting the drive back to a singe partition, I got it to work. But then a month later the drive gave out and I almost lost 250GB or my media. DIskWarrior saved that catastrophe. I ended up getting the drive repaired. LaCie would not replace it, even though it was only 3 months old. Other people with LaCie drives have had issues with Time Machine also. I went back to using SuperDuper and doing scheduled backups with a new Beyond Micro drive I purchased. I don't trust this Lacie drive anymore for backups, especially it's partitioned.
-Bmer
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