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Choose the number of volumes (normally one) from the Volume Scheme dropdown.

When you buy a hard drive that you will use with Time Machine, the first thing you do after connecting it to your Mac should be this (the instructions are for the current version of Mac OS X, which is 10.5.6): Do this before using a disk with Time Machine This apparently does not change the disks partition map scheme.

I just clicked on the Erase tab, selected Mac OS Extended (Journaled) as the volume format, entered a volume name, and clicked Erase. Well, the setting for this is hidden in an Options dialog in Disk Utility’s Partition tab, and I never went there when I reformatted the drive. You may be wondering why reformatting the disk did not also change the partition map scheme. It took several hours, but all seems to be working well and my backup history is intact. Luckily I had bought an identical hard drive to backup another Mac, and was able to use the Disk Utility application included with Mac OS X 10.5 to clone the contents of my Time Machine drive to the other drive after changing its partition map scheme. Doing that obviously means losing all your backup history up to that point, which I was not interested in. According to the Apple support document Mac OS X 10.5: Time Machine stops backing up to external disk, Time Machine wants disks to use either GUID Partition Table or Apple Partition Map.įine, but the problem is that to change the partition map scheme you need to erase the disk. What I found was that Time Machine does not work well with the Master Boot Record (MBR) partition map scheme that Windows-formatted disks use. Beware of the Master Boot Record partition type This was obviously worrying, so I started looking for what could be causing it. Time Machine reported failed backup attempts and sometimes seemed to have problems even finding the backup disk. I bought an external USB drive, hooked it up, reformatted it as Mac OS Extended (Journaled) instead of the Windows file system the drive shipped with, and started Time Machine.Įverything worked fine for a couple of weeks, but then some strange things started happening. Since Mac OS X comes with Time Machine built in, I decided to give it a try. Previously I used DVD-R:s for backing up my personal data, but I wanted an automated backup system in place. Reformat and repartition hard drives before using them with Time MachineĪ month or so ago I bought an external hard drive to use as a backup disk with Apple’s Time Machine.