Time Machine formatted my external harddrive to apple specific file system

I agreed to delete all files on my external harddrive to use it for Time Machine
I didnt count on the process to exclude the harddrive from being used on my windows machine
Is there any way I can reformat the harddrive to FAT 32 or NTFS?
I dont want to buy a third party program at almost the same price as a new external hard drive
Preferably I get two partitions on the external harddrive: one compatible with Time Machine and one that I can use to move files between my mac and PC
Is that possible within Mac OS X Leopard?
Thanks
Rasmus

TM drive must be formatted mac os extended. what you can do is split the external in two partitions , format one for TM and format the other FAT. you can also format the other partition NTFS (has to be done from windows or with 3rd party software) but then you'll need to install NTFS-3g which makes NTFS drives writable from OS X. there is also NTFS for Mac by paragon but unlike NTFS-3g it's not free and you say you don't want to pay.
also, you need to repartition your drive with GUID partition scheme.
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=1964018#5
this will wipe it again so you'll have to restart your TM backups after that.

Similar Messages

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    This forum is dedicated to AppleWorks.
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    i am using for first time the time machine and an external hard drive because I want to erase my macbook and start from zero files. Am i keeping my files in the portable hard disk when I will connect it again with the macbook or the time machine will erase all?
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