Found a great way to backup my macbook using a 500gb external notebook drive.
Partition the drive into three separate partitions:
10gb leopard boot drive
32gb dos-fat windows/mac drive for data
425+ time machine drive
I did not create a fourth "Mac" drive as you can use the time machine drive for temporary drag and drop of files. However you could optional create a designated amount of drive space for files written and read by Mac. The 32gb is the max size available to be read and write to by both mac and pc's.
Pop your original Leopard install disk into your mac. Open Disk Utility and choose the Leopard disk partition. Select RESTORE at the top of the menu. Two optional lines: SOURCE and DESTINATION will be available. Drag the Leopard disk partition onto the SOURCE. Drag the Leopard Boot Drive partition you created (visible in Disk Utility above the Leopard Disk) onto the DESTINATION. Finally select the "erase destination" option and click ok.
Took about 25 minutes to run so be patient...
At this point you may want to reboot to test the drive (DO NOT REINSTALL OR YOU WILL LOSE ALL DATA!!!!). So be careful not to go any further than selecting the language. To test you would reboot and press the options key to view the newly created external drive. Or if you're nervous just go on to the next step but you need to test this out at some point.
Run the timemachine setup in System Preferences and choose your TIME MACHINE DRIVE that you created. Once backed up you should be set!
Now you have an external drive that fits almost anywhere with a COMPLETE recovery solution of the Leopard install disk and all of your data (plus some!) Not to mention all of the recovery tools available from the original Leopard install disk.
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