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Hi,

 

I have two computers (a PC and a Mac) and a Maxtor One Touch External Hard disk 250 GB. I would like to back up these two machines using a single external hard disk. So I have partitioned the hard disk into two and have NTFS and FAT32 as the file systems. The NTFS partition is around 163 GB and the FAT32 is around 75GB. I have Retrospect 7.0 for the PC and Retrospect Desktop (Retrospect 6.0) for Mac. I could successfully back up the PC into the NTFS part but have problems with the Mac.

 

When the hard disk is mounted on to the Mac, both the partitions appear on the desktop. The Mac OS is 10.3 and it identifies both partition correctly. It recognises the NTFS part as readonly and FAT32 part as "readable and writable".

 

But when I tried to backup for the first time there was an error saying "insert a new disk". I tried to overwrite the contents of the FAT32 part as I didn't need them any longer hence asked to proceed with the backup. The Mac started erasing. I thought it was erasing the files previously present in the FAT32 part but it continued erasing for some time and finally erased the FAT32 file system itself. So the icon representing the FAT32 part of the partition of the external hard disk disappeared from the Mac's desktop.

 

Later when I checked the partitions with Partition Magic, the FAT32 part appeared as unformatted and NTFS part was fine.

 

I reformatted the unformatted part to FAT32 and tried backing up again. This time, the moment I clicked the backup button, the FAT32 file system was automatically deleted and the icon representing this part on the Mac's desktop was deleted.

 

I don't want to transfer any data between the PC and the Mac. I just want to backup them seperately. These two computers are not in network.

 

Now, my questions are:

1. Where did I go wrong? Can't I backup two machines this way?

 

2. Does formatting FAT32 part into HFS/HFS+ help? Can HFS+ and NTFS file systems co-exist in a single external hard disk?

 

3. If both of the above methods don't work, how should I back up a Mac and a PC? Should I have to buy two seperate external hard disk for that?

 

Please help me.....

 

Thanks

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