i delete files and my hard drive shows the same amount of space as before

Hi everyone.
Wasnt sure if I should post this in hardware or software. I have a macbook pro osx 10.4 . 111 gb of hard drive space in all. I was at 104 gigs and finally got around to deleting things off the drive. I removed 40 gigs of music, some 15 gigs of movies and a few other other things. It still said I only had 7 gigs of free space after all that. My trash was emptied too. I used a program to delete a few other odds and ends and that knocked off 5 gigs. So after deleting all my music and movies and so on...i have 12 gigs free on a 111 gig hard drive. I systematically went through everything and counted about 45 gigs of actual content that can be accounted for. I've been having this problem for some time but it's only now after deleting some 60 gigs that I noticed. I ran Verify disk and it came up clean.
What's going on here?

Thanks for any help in advance.

Sonny

Open terminal and type...

du -sch .Trash

if it's not 0k it's not empty..

Before

after


if it's not 0 you should be able to ..

cd .Trash
pwd

if that says
/Users/<username>/.Trash

then you can

rm items.

tried that

Tried that and it said 0kb the first time I ran that command. Any other thoughts?

How about trying a shut down and then re start - freshen things up.

Collin Bl said:

How about trying a shut down and then re start - freshen things up.

Click to expand...

My thoughts exactly.

Then you might want to try out one of these:
Disk Inventory X - free

WhatSize - not free, but probably the best of the lot

did that

Starting up was the first thing I did after deleting my stuff. The problem is the sparseimage which is 80 gigs. With Inventory x everything checks out as it did with finder. They both ended up leading me to this massive file. I had filevault on but now I cant take it off. Tried to disactivate it and it said I needed 4084 gigs to do so. Is there a way to open that sparseimage file up and delete things from there? I'm also contemplating just setting up a new user and deleting this one (would rather not though).

solved it

got Diskwarrior. Activated Root user account. Installed Diskwarrior and repaired the main user sparseimage. Ends up it had 1300 errors in volume information and other things. Restarted in the main user and turned off filevault with no problems. instead of having 11 gigs free I now has 92 gigs free. I also backed up all my files from the main user account first. Mac works great now and no more random errors.