Hard disk almost full. HELP!

Hi all, it's my first time posting a question here so sorry if this isn't where it belongs. I have an iMac (mid 2011 model) running on OSX Lion 10.7.5 with 8GB of RAM.

Recently I switched the hard disk from a 500GB to a brand new 1TB one, partitioning it down the middle naming them HD1 and HD2, the first for the OS and the second for storage and backups.

I use my iMac mostly for managing my family's two iPads and two iPhones and recently I thought i'd check out my usage when i noticed that my HD1 is almost full.

I click on the apple icon (About this Mac) and this is what I got (screen shot 1).

Clicking on HD1 in the Finder shows only five folders (screen shot2) in that disk and they add up to about 235 GB so i'm trying to figure out what else is taking up all that space.

I've emptied my trash but it still shows that i'm down to about 35GB of space.

Some help please? Thank you so much!

I like to use Grand Perspective (free) to determine what's taking up space. Be very cautious in deleting things however.

Thanks chas. Grand perspective showed a big chunk is taken up by the iphoto library. which is no coincidence as now i've got a new problem. my iphoto library is "damaged or unreadable". am forced to rebuild my thumbnails as we speak...

Recently I switched the hard disk from a 500GB to a brand new 1TB one, partitioning it down the middle naming them HD1 and HD2, the first for the OS and the second for storage and backups.

Click to expand...

Not a good strategy or use of your new hard drive. What happens to your backups and storage if the drive fails? Advice: Never use an internal hard drive for backups. As inexpensive as large external hard drives are, there's no reason to use your internal drive for backups or storage.

chscag said:

Not a good strategy or use of your new hard drive. What happens to your backups and storage if the drive fails? Advice: Never use an internal hard drive for backups. As inexpensive as large external hard drives are, there's no reason to use your internal drive for backups or storage.

Click to expand...

good point. i use my internal drive to store photos and videos (can still lose them if the drive fails, i know) and my time machine is on a usb drive but it's only 500GB in size, which is why i split the drive that way. a 1TB ext drive has my name on it out there somewhere.