Time Machine not backup up anything, from the very start

Hello,
I have recently purchased a 1 TB external drive for use as a backup drive. I plugged it in, reformatted it as HFS+ and set up Time Machine to use it as a backup drive.
Time Machine has supposedly been running for almost a week now, but all of the backups are emtpy - they are simply backups of "Macintosh HD" as an empty folder. Clicking "Backup now" results in a half second backup, which is supposedly successful, but which is empty.
I've turned TM off, ejected the disk, deleted the Time Machine .plist and restarted the Mac Pro and then the process of setting up Time Machine, and yet the initial backup lasts mere moments and turns out to be empty.
I've verified the startup disk and the drive being used as a backup in Disk Utility. The disk is 1 TB, empty, verified, and working. Time Machine is for some reason not. Help?

Bizarre.
About the only other things I can think of are (loooong shots, of course):
Try the Terminal command in the yellow box of #11 [Time Machine - Frequently Asked Questions|http://web.me.com/pondini/Time_Machine/FAQ.html] (or use the link in *User Tips* at the top of this forum).
If there's any extra space on your internal HD, make a very small partition on it temporarily, copy a handful of test files to it, and see if they get backed-up. If they do, then change some things and run a second backup. See #3 in [Formatting, Partitioning, Verifying, and Repairing Disks|http://web.me.com/pondini/AppleTips/DU.html] (or use the link in *User Tips* at the top of the +Using Snow Leopard+ forum) if by chance you don't know how to do that.
Something may be corrupted/damaged in your installation of OSX. I'd suggest downloading and installing the "combo" update. That's the cleverly-named combination of all the updates to Leopard since it was first released, so installing it should fix anything that's gone wrong since then, such as with one of the normal "point" updates. Info and download available at: http://support.apple.com/downloads/MacOS_X_10_5_8_ComboUpdate Be sure to do a +Repair Permissions+ via Disk Utility (in your Applications/Utilities folder) afterwards

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Message was edited by: zymosan

zymosan wrote:
I recently had a HD die, I replaced it and restored from my TM back up. I then formatted the TM drive and am now trying to do a full back up however when I do I get an error saying that the back up size is 525GB but my HD is only a 500GB drive of which only 450GB are used.
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