External Hard Drive Question

I just purchased a Maxtor One-Touch 250GB External Hard Drive.
The plan is to back up the hard drives of two WinXP Pro machines
and three Win98 systems onto it.

Three questions:

1. Is it possible to partition the Maxtor drive with the NTFS format
on the first partition (approx 100GB) and then format a second
partition for Fat 32?

2. Using Acronis True Image, should I be able to image any of the
hard drives onto the external drive?

3. Maxtor's manual says they don't support backing up to their external
drive over a network. Has anyone tried this?

Thanks!
Scott

"Scott" wrote in message
...
I just purchased a Maxtor One-Touch 250GB External Hard Drive.
The plan is to back up the hard drives of two WinXP Pro machines
and three Win98 systems onto it.

Three questions:

1. Is it possible to partition the Maxtor drive with the NTFS format
on the first partition (approx 100GB) and then format a second
partition for Fat 32?

Should not pose a problem.


2. Using Acronis True Image, should I be able to image any of the
hard drives onto the external drive?

That should work as well, as long as it has USB drivers (it should). Make
sure you have USB 2 (or firewire) -- USB 1.x will be painfully slow.

3. Maxtor's manual says they don't support backing up to their external
drive over a network. Has anyone tried this?

Should work fine to a host PC on a network (I doubt these drives have a
built-in server the way NAS appliances do).