OK. Need help with an external drive and time machine

[imported_Shivetya]

but time machine will not work unless its formatted to Apple specs.

Is there a way to repartition without destroying the contents?

One option is to copy the entire external to another system and restore it later. However I need two partitions! One that preserves the WD software setup and one for time machine.

 

[TheStu]

I am fairly certain that you can only dynamically partition HFS+ drives, which is what Time Machine needs in the first place. If you have Vista, it can dynamically partition drives. So you could hook it up to a Vista machine, partition it how you want/need, then rehook it up to OS X to format that new partition with HFS+.

OS X also cannot write to NTFS (and Windows cannot read or write HFS) so that is why you need to use 2 OSes to do this.