external hard drive and time machine

K

keithblakeman

Registered
Hi,

Just got back in to macs yay! they are the best. Anyway, I have a netstore 3500 packard bell external hard drive. I can access it either via ftp or smb no problem. My son has a PC and uses it too, but his pc has the drive mapped I cant seem to do this on the mac.

I want to use it to back up via time machine. Problem is when I turn time machine on it does not find the external hard drive event though I can connect to it, Why is that?

What do I need to do to do this? I have got alot of stuff on the hard drive so would prefer not to format the drive again, plus it took me a while to configure it as im not fab with computers. I am thinking I could some how partition the drive and use part of it for my mac and part for my sons pc. Can this be done without formating the drive?
 
I think believe HDs have to be HFS+ (also called Mac OS Extended (journalled)) formatted to work with Time machine. Sorry!

Someone else may be abel to help you with the repartioning without formatting though if memory serves this is not always easy.
 
Time Machine requires an external harddrive to be connected via USB or Firewire and formatted as HFS+ (Mac OS Extended), unless it is shared via AFP (like TimeCapsule by Apple). SMB or FTP won't do, sadly. Formatting the drive won't help you either, because then the network protocol would still get in the way.
 
I was just looking at that fryke, cheers for the info, some sites seemed to suggest that you could do time machine over ethernet but in fact they all were talking about the time capsule.
 
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