What If Time Machine stops to backing up data to external hard drive on Mac OS X 10.5

External hard drive from IomegaImage via Wikipedia
Have you ever faced problem while backing up you data to an external hard drive from the time Machine for the first time. I did, Today after a long time I sat down to backup my data to an external hard drive from my Mac OS X 10.5 Time Machine It was the first instance that I was trying to back up my data. The back up process stopped just after a backup of around 10 GB of data. The Time Machine stopped backing up the data.

Solution:

For such kind of errors you need to make sure that back up of the data is taken at some other location or hard disk.

For the disks that have the Master Boot Record(MBR) Partition type. It's required to change the type of the partition by erasing the data on the disk. Erasing the data will remove the data from the disc so a prior backup is really important. If the data being erased only a Mac data recovery software will be able to recover the data. So, to eliminate the probability of incurring extra cost you need to BACKUP.

Erasing the data is required so that it supports Time Machine.

Steps to follow:

1. Open Disk Utility.
2. Now select the icon on the disk for backup, which is located at the left side of the window.
3. Now you will see a Tab named partition
4. Click the partition Tab
5. Are you seeing a tabs like RAID, First Aid, Restore, erase if yes, then you have selected a volume instead of disk
6. Go back and select the disc again.
7. Now a Volume Scheme pop-up menu will appear, here you need to choose the desired number of partition.
8. Then Click the "Options..." button.
9. New partition scheme ids to be selected now:
  • If you want to use the disk with a Time Machine and a PowerPC-based Mac then in that case use the Apple Partition Map partition scheme
  • If you want it to use with a Time Machine and a Intel-based Mac then use the GUID partition scheme
10. Once done with this Click OK.
11. Now, Click Apply. This will erase the data on the disk.

Note: If in case you don't want to get in to technicalities, you can opt for Partition Manager Software to partition the hard drive too.

Once you have repartitioned the external hard disk, select the external hard drive again from the Time Machine and use it for backup purposes.

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