01-19-2012, 11:05 AM

I have an Imac 10.6.6 500GB. My hard drive is reading as having only 499MB available. The computer is nearly completely empty as far as storage goes. I am assuming that my computer is not communicating with the internal hard drive. The computer is in it's original state. unable to make software updates due to lack of space. Disk permissions have been repaired. I don't have any idea what else to do. Can anyone help? Thanks.

01-19-2012, 11:28 AM

Grand Perspective is your friend here. Run that and see what it says.

01-19-2012, 12:11 PM

I downloaded Grand Perspective but it is showing 499 GB available. When I open a new finder window, it is saying that I only have 400MB. I keep getting messages that my hard drive is almost full.

01-19-2012, 12:16 PM

Use Disk Utility to see if there is a different partition available to mount.

Use Terminal Utility and run the command "df" and show us the output.

01-19-2012, 12:54 PM

I didn't see a different partition available to mount in the disk utility, and I'm sorry but I don't know what you mean about the Terminal utility.

01-19-2012, 12:59 PM

Filesystem 512-blocks Used Available Capacity Mounted on
/dev/disk0s2 976101344 974884424 704920 100% /
devfs 213 213 0 100% /dev
map -hosts 0 0 0 100% /net
map auto_home 0 0 0 100% /home

01-19-2012, 01:26 PM

According to the df output, your disk is indeed getting close to full. By the way, if you want more readable output, try "df -Hl".

Ok, so Grand Perspective says you have 499GB available which is impossible since the OS alone takes up more than 1GB of space. Are you sure that GP didn't actually say 499MB? I'm willing to bet that it did. In that case, every tool is telling you that you are indeed running dangerously low on disk space.