Startup disk full message when it shouldnt be full

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Hello all so i left my laptop on last night to upload a video to vimeo. I restarted it this morning so i could go back into 32bit mode because my audio interface only works in that mode. So it start back up and i get that message. 1st thing i do is check it it says i have 32mbs left on the internal disk. Last night i had 160gb free. I also ran disk inventory to see what it was but the biggest file was my aperture library. So what do you guys think happened? A virus thats tricking my system thinking its full when its not? Right now i cant even boot up anymore because it seems as if the file is growing and now my comp wont go past the apple screen, i do have my stuff backed up though so if i have to ill wipe the system and i have a techtool startup disk on my external drive too so i am able to boot from their at lest but it wont let me delete files so i can boot from my regular startup drive, I am currently running techtool pro for tests but doubt ill find anything from their, and sorry im rushing so i might have missed something. Please help because this is my production computer.
6gbram
500gbHD
Snow Leopard
 
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CAMERA MAN
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No one? Is the best thing to do is to just wipe and reinstall?
 
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Were you rendering anything to your internal drive like in FCS? If you were, that's probably where all your space went, especially if you're doing HD work...
 
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Check this out - it was sent to me so do you own checking;

I had to use this post in a forum to find where all my missing HDD space went after Jxxxx pulled the plug.
Looks like SuperDuper had started copying my files to a temporary link /Volumes/Media_BUOS on its own internal HDD. So using terminal with the HDD removed I had to delete the link and all files in it. (sudo rm -rf ...)

Both WhatSize and Disk Inventory X suffer from the same fatal flaw: they won't find any files that your user doesn't have permission to see. And thus the total found will always be less than what's really on the disk. In my case, a quick test of Disk Inventory X found that it completely missed about 10 GB of files.

The only way to fix this is to run it directly as the super user from Terminal:
Code:
sudo /Volumes/HDDxx/Applications/Disk\ Inventory\ X.app/Contents/MacOS/Disk\ Inventory\ X
(all one line)

Only then will you get an accurate breakdown of disk usage. Of course, either of these apps could fix the problem by using Apple's provided APIs for obtaining super user access by asking for an administrator password. Until then, many unsuspecting users will be getting false data...
 
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CAMERA MAN
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Were you rendering anything to your internal drive like in FCS? If you were, that's probably where all your space went, especially if you're doing HD work...

Its funny because lately my mbp has been using up a lot of ram even after apps have been closed, like 3 of my 6 gbs of ram. Its been weird, i have been going into the activity monitor and manually quiting things compressor transcoding. I was compressing something late last night and wanted to finish it but it was taking to long so i stopped it, and the cpu went from 99% back down to around 10% so i know it did stop but i could bet compressor transcoding was still on in the activity monitor but didnt think anything of it that night. All off my media is all on a external G-RAID 2tb but this video that was compressed for viewing was on my internal drive because it was small and i was attempting to compress it smaller for my phone, so that is a possibility but the original file was only 500mbs. As for now i wiped my drive and restored the drive but i didnt back everything up like the librarys so the pro apps i have to install all over again but its probably best i do it anyway even though i just did for SL.

Thanks for that also Collin Bl, i dont use superduper but i can bet something like that happened. Hidden files somewhere, it may of just had thousands of little mb files as well too that i didn't pick up because of my rushing, i wish i could have saved that report to go over it now. Thanks for your input.
 

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