02-05-2006, 05:00 AM

Guys- I have lot of files on my 40gb PB, and its always telling me the startup disk is almost full. So I'll delete 3 gigs of files and then a week later it's getting full again even though I'm only pulling a few 3mb movies and some pics here and there off the internet.

So I ran omnidisksweeper, a pretty neat, free app, and it could only find 25gigs of files TOTAL on my HD, "private" system files included.

What seems to be the problem?

Thanx!!!!!

02-05-2006, 01:51 PM

Run Disk Inventory X, it scans your HD and tells you what exactly is taking so much space. (It's free too)

02-06-2006, 11:47 AM

Thank you for responding! :girl:

I'm gonna try it now!

02-06-2006, 01:38 PM

Sorry to double post!

Ok I tried it and it is very cool, but it only did the same thing as omnidisksweeper: it displayed the type and distribution of files on my HD, totaling 23 gigs.

What it doesn't explain is why I only have 1.5 gigs of free space on a 37.3 ("40")gig disk. neye:

Any more ideas, guys?

02-06-2006, 08:19 PM

Seems to me that you're just going to have to buy an external and clear off some of the stuff that is on there. Having less than 2GB worth of free space is not at all good for OSX, you'll start having slow-down issues and risk corruption.

You could run a program like DeLocalizer which takes out any unnecessary languages (usually saves 1-2GB).

I would also recommend simply going through your Home folder and deleting/burning to CD anything that is absolutely not necessary for everyday use.

02-08-2006, 02:15 AM

An odd issue I've seen on a friend's Mac. He was mounting network drives, but somehow he encountered a bug in which he lost a connection, but OS X wrote all the files he transferred to a folder in /Volumes. Now, OS X likes to hide things from us, so to check for these issues, you'll have to get down and dirty with Unix!

Open Terminal (apps->utilities) and you'll get a scary looking command prompt.

Before going further....perhaps your filesystem is corrupt. Have you run fsck -y lately? Try booting into single user mode. I forget the keystroke off the top of my head, it was something like pressing ctrl, option, or command + s when booting, then after the machine boots, type 'fsky -y' [return] then the machine will do a detailed check of your filesystem, and fix the fixable errors. Keep running this until it no longer says that the filesystem was modified. If you are running this more than 5 times and it still says the filesystem was modded, it could be that your hard drive is bad or your filesystem is beyond repair. Type 'exit' [return] and your mac will finish booting normally.

type 'df -h' [return] (no ticks, [return] means press return/enter)
You will get a cryptic readout of what Unix thinks your disk usage is. The line that lists '/' in the 'Mounted on' column is your hard disk. If Size does not match how much disk space you should have, do you perhaps have the disk split into two partitions? Or perhaps does unix see the disk usage correctly but the mac software reading it wrong?

type 'cd /' [return]
type 'du -h -d 1 2>/dev/null' [return]
This may take a few. Eject all CDs, Network Drives/Shares, Disk Images, etc before running, else its data will be skewed. The root directory is '/'. This will list each directory there, and tell you how much hard disk space is being used by that folder, then a total at the end. Find a directory with an unusually high usage? type 'cd [directory name]' [return] then run the du command again. It will now give you a detailed listing of just the folders in that directory.

Hope this helps.

02-08-2006, 12:12 PM

Single User Mode is "Command + S" on boot up.