missing disk space

Firstly, I'm a Mac novice but i do have 10 years IT experience with windows and unix so excuse me if i'm being a numpty.

I have (inherited) a power mac 3.5 running 10.4.8.

My startup disk says its a macintosh G4 and has only 276Mb of free space out of a capacity of 57 GB when using get info.

When I look at the amount of combined data on there by looking at the size of the folders (applications, groups, library, shared items, systems and users) it equates to about 4 GB!

If i look at the data on the disk via a bash terminal it shows plenty of other hidden (i guess) directorys and files.

Does anybody know where all my disk space has gone??

Thanks in advance
Nick

how is the drive formatted? mac os extended journaled is the norm for most mac users.

I know its a dumb question, but is there a lot in the trash folder?

There are some hidden directories in OS X but they dont account for all that missing space.

Can you give us a rundown of the sizes of each folder at the root (first level)

Try Disk Iventory X also to track where that space is used and get back to us

http://www.derlien.com/

Both, Firstly thanks for getting back to me, its proabably something really silly!

How is the drive formatted? - how do I find out? and what is disk inventory X? How do i run that ?

Sorry - Mac novice !

No, no trash in the folder unfortunatley.

see attached, it may help?

Disk Inventory X is a program you need to download. It'll give you a visual breakdown of what is taking up all the space on your drive.

hmm, i'm not sure I have the space to install it ! but i'll try.

Thanks
Nick

you dont want to fill up your drive, that can create other problems.

Thanks all, especially louishen and kash for the utility advice.

Its sorted.. well mostly. I installed Disk Inventory X and found that the volume directory had loads of backed up files. 49 GB to be precise so I deleted a few un important ones and have freed up 7 GB.

This should be enough to get us by for some time as it is only really used as a file server and this disk (should) only be used for boot.

I'm hoping that this will fix my backup issue with retropect saying "error 34 volume full" (which is a lie) and "backup set limit is 2 GB" (which is also a lie as i have been backing up 35GB for months)

Cheers
Nick