IT WORKS!!

The new external hard drive (the black thing on the right hand side of the picture) worked as expected right out of the box. Well, except for the fact it was formatted as the Windows-default NTFS. That was a bit unexpected, but that's why Mac OS X has Disk Utility. I set up three partitions, one for Time Machine (HD Welles), a smallish one as a bootable Leopard partition (DaVinci), and one as FAT32 for D&M (Dandelion).

Once Leo detected HD Welles, Time Machine went right to work. 50+ gigs backed up without any intervention on my part. An hour later, another backup . . . etc.

To see how restore worked, I deleted a folder full of old WoW mods from my desktop and emptied the trash. Invoked Time Machine, and looked at my last backup. There it was . . . Two clicks later, and it was back on my desktop.

Just for fun, I forced a TM backup manually rather than waiting for the hourly automated backup. The only sign I saw on my screen of the backup in process was a small circle icon next to the external hard drive. Groovy!

Now to install Leo on the DaVinci partition. I'm also going to use the partition as dump storage and to test how other applications interact with a external hard disk. I'll be doing that at my workstation because there I have an optical drive that works.