Time machine - ext USB drive - failure

After reformatting & partitioning an external USB drive, I can't get Time Machine to do a back up on it (I've been using TM on several macs, including this one, and this drive, for years). The backup begins and after copying a few GBs of data, I get the message "the backup was not performed because an error occurred while copying files to the backup disk"
I have repaired the disk with Disk Utility, without success. I've erased the disk with Disk Utility & then repaired it. I've restarted many times. I can't see what the problem is.
The mini's internal HD is 320 GB; the external drive is 1TB, in  2-500 GB partitions. One partition is used for TM, the other for a daily SuperDuper backup. The SuperDuper backups are working fine.  

As Mr. Ross pointed out above, start Console and check the logs.  Find the error message "The backup was not performed because an error occurred while copying files to the backup disk," then look for preceding related errors.  In my case I saw a bunch of Disk I/O errors that turned out to be a defective hard disk.  Every time the backup got to a specific size (and presumably a specific location on the drive), Time Machine would fail and the disk would occasionally unmount by itself.

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    I found this when searching Apple's web site but it is old, October 2007, and said it could not be done. Has this changed since then?
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    * Article: 306833
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    Try E2/4  in the 1st linked article.
    Time Machine Troubleshooting
    Time Machine Troubleshooting Problems
    James Pond (Pondini) died last year unfortunately.

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    JGaron wrote:
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    Once you have the drive connected to your Mac, click System Preferences (gear icon) on the dock
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  • Time Machine sees my drive but will not use it.

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    No, pondini has enough to keep himself occupied with apple routers.. getting TM to work on non-apple routers maybe simply impossible.
    Here is Netgear version.
    http://www.netgear.com/assets/landing/readyshare/readyshare-time-machine.pdf
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