Hello,

I have a 700 gb external hard drive that I use for my Time Machine Backups on my Macbook Pro, but the Macbook only has a 320 gb hard drive and I have a ton of extra space. Time Machine wouldn't allow me to have more than one partition on the drive. The drive is formatted in HFS+ (or however Time Machine sets it up).

I'm about to wipe the drive on a different laptop running Windows, and I have about 100 gb of files I want to back up. Windows will not mount the HFS+ external drive, so I decided to use a live USB with Ubuntu 9 to boot Linux and copy the files from the laptop to the external drive.

The Time Machine drive mounts properly when I plug it into the second laptop running linux from the usb. It shows up on the desktop and I can see the files already on it. However, when I try to copy anything to the drive, an error pops up showing that the drive is read only.

I opened terminal and typed mount, and it read the following:
/dev/sdc2 on /media/Time Machine Backups type hfsplus (rw,nosuid,nodev,uhelper=devkit)

I was surprised that the drive was labelled rw, so I reconnected the drive to my Macbook, and checked the permissions. It was set to read and write for everyone, but just in case I made a new permission for user "ubuntu", which is the user the live USB loads into, and labelled it read and write. That didn't do anything..

Any ideas as to how I can write things to my external Time Machine drive from Linux?

Thanks!

You could try
mount -o rw /dev/sdc2 /media/Time

But if what I read from wikipedia is correct ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HFS_Plus#Linux ) then you will not be able to write to the drive under Linux if it is the journaled version of HFS+.

I tried the above mount command, and the result was "mount: mount point /media/Time does not exist". What can I do for that?

And,
So then, would it be possible to use gparted to resize the main partition, and add another partition without messing up any of the data on the original Time Machine set up? ie. run gparted, resize main partition without erasing data, add an NTFS partition (I'm going to use dd if=/dev/sda of=/media/Time Machine Backups/file.dd to copy the hard drive bit for bit to the external, so I can't use FAT because of the 100gb file, or at least that's what I've heard), and then run dd? Then again, I ran gparted and it shows the file system for the external as unknown

Whoops, misread, it should be "/mnt/Time\ Machine\ Backups". As for gparted, don't know, never used it. You'll just have to read the documentation or something.