Reformatting a Western Digital My Passport hard drive to function well on Windows. Windows XP and Windows Vista can only create 32GB FAT32 partitions,. I partitioned my drive before installing Mac OS X Lion so that I could maintain my stable Mac OS X 10.6 system software while still exploring the Lion 10.7 Developer Preview, and I do this frequently with other software releases as well, even with El Capitan and Snow Leopard side by side on different partitions. Another common use is to partition large external hard drives for a specific Time Machine backup partition, and then a separate storage partition.
I have purchased a 1TB Western Digital My Passport Drive (an external drive connected via USB). How should I format this drive to use it with Time Machine?
I'm running OSX 10.6.8 on an Intel iMac (hardware circa 2005). I have been using Time Machine for several years, rotating through external disks. Thie new disk will replace one of the previous disks which has failed. I have forgotten how I formatted the previous disks. I'm primarily interested in whther to use HFS or whatnot. As to partitioning, the format will just be one partition for the whole disk.
I'm going to see if I can figure this out using Disk Utility, but in the mean time, does anyone have recommendations?