Time Machine and Seagate FreeAgent Desktop

I recently installed Mac OSX Leopard and have been looking forward to using the Time Machine backup feature. I regularly trash hard drives, so regular backups would be a good habit to get into. I went out and bought a 500GB FreeAgent USB 2.0 drive to do the job.

Long story short, I fired up Time Machine and it wouldn't recognize the drive (no error messages at all). After futzing around for awhile I inspected the drive with the built in drive utility and noticed that by default the drive is formatted as FAT (not even FAT32, whoa). So a quick reformat as Mac OS Extended (Journaled) made Time Machine much happier.

Woulda been nice if they could have popped a nice informational message stating that it couldn't write to FAT drives, suggesting I reformat or even offered to do it for me.