How to access the desktop ?

Mac OS ignoring new size of enlarged HFS+ partition

Hi,

After replacing a 80 Gb hard drive by a 500 Gb one on a MacBook black running Snow Leopard 10.6.3, and enlarging the size of the main partition to ~ 500 Gb, I'm having problems with "Macintosh HD" being considered full with only 80 Gb of data.

The Disk Utility displays two partitions :
- disk0s1 (209.70 Mb), which is the boot partition. (100% filled with blue)
- Macintosh HD (~500 Gb), which is the main partition. (~16% filled, aka ~80 Gb)

Despite the Disk Utility recognizes the second partition as being 500 Gb, Mac OS X display warnings telling that the system partition is full (with 80 Gb of data and not any free Kb available anymore).

By clicking the "Macintosh HD" icon on the desktop, and going to the menu "File > Get info", a size of only 80 Gb is displayed.

I cannot remember exactly how I increased the size of the "Macintosh HD" partition (using Disk Utility and possibly a Linux boot CD), but things were done in this order :
1) cloned the 80 Gb drive to a 500 Gb one
2) replaced the 80 Gb drive by the 500 Gb one
3) upgraded from Tiger to Snow Leopard (keeping user files)
4) increased the size of the "Macintosh HD" partition up to the end of the disk.

How can I make the OS take into account the additional 420 Gb ?

Thanks a lot.

Hi,

I'm coming from Windows and I'm lost about how to access something on the desktop, for instance how to click on the "Macintosh HD" on the desktop ?

If I put the mouse cursor in the bottom right corner, all application windows display like thumbnails.
The desktop himself is like behind a translucent filter.
But when I click on the desktop, this brings one application window to the front (the web browser in my case).

I tried pressing several time on F11 and the web browser came to the front, in full window mode. But I cannot access its buttons to minimize the window. Instead is a colored rotating wheel because the app is not responding.

The rotating wheel comes from the fact that the disk is full, making apps unresponsive.

The issue is that I want to access some icon on the desktop in order to solve the problem.

Thanks for your help.

Looks like you've got a lot of issues going on..

For starters:
* What Mac?
* What version of OS X?
* How much memory do you have?
* How much disk space do you have total and how much free (you did say the disk is full)?

Coming from Windows, you might be tempted to put stuff on the desktop to access things ,I would suggest you not do that. Use the Finder to access your HD/folder/applications. Keep your desktop free of clutter and actually anything at all..

All those thumbnails and accessing through corners is all part of Mission Control and it looks you've enabled Hot Corner. You can go to System Preferences->Mission Control and play with those..

The idea of Mission Control is to give you a glimpse of all the applications running on all Spaces (desktops) and allow you to switch to ones that are behind others or whatever..

Your most pressing issue is that your disk is full. OS X is very unhappy in those situations, you should leave at least 20% of your disk free for OS X to work properly. So promptly delete files you don't need or back up important stuff to external media (HDD or USB) and then delete them..

Can you see the Dock? If so, right-click on the browser icon and select Force Quit. That should get you back to the desktop.

Thanks to both of you.

In fact, this is not my computer as I'm helping someone.
This is also why I'm a newbie on Mac. (Thanks you, Raz0rEdge, for your useful tips and explanations !)

Lot of files are currently opened and under editing. I was asked to not close them without saving them.
For this reason, my number 1 priority is to transfer some files to an external drive to get some free space because it's impossible to save yet the files that are under editing.

The computer is a MacBook A1181 (black) running Mac OS X 10.6.3.
The amount of RAM is 2 Gb.

The drive was originally a 80 Gb one, which was replaced by a 500 Gb one, by low level cloning.
The "Macintosh HD" partition was then enlarged up to the end of the new drive.
The Disk Utility shows it about 500 Gb and only ~16% full (i.e. 80 Gb).

But the "File > Get info" applied to "Macintosh HD" shows only 80 Gb (with 0 Kb free).
I assume, that the "Macintosh HD" is a volume which size matches thus of the previous partition on the old disk.

If there was a way to make the system understand that the size of the volume should now be thus of the 500 Gb partition, the space problem would be solved quickly !

Any idea ?

This is a double post of the same problem. Would a MOD please merge this with brink's other thread to keep the answers together?

I think you are going to need an external drive to safely solve the problem. Your other post says you have applications open that cannot save files because no space exists on the HD, and that your friend/customer/whatever doesn't want the apps closed without saving the files. So, to save the files, you need to attach an external storage device (HD, thumb drive, etc) and save the open files to there, then close the apps to free up memory and probably some drive space as well. Then you can do a backup of the HD to another external device and redo the partitioning of the new internal drive. I'm not sure how you "increased the size of the "Macintosh HD" partition up to the end of the disk," but whatever you did didn't really do that because Macintosh HD is still showing at 80 GB. The best way to get to what you want is to use Time Machine to backup your entire HD to an external HD, create an bootable USB stick, then use Disk Utility to repartition the internal drive to ONE partition, boot from the USB stick and use Time Machine to restore the backup. That's tiresome, but the best way to make sure you get what you want.

If there was a way to make the system understand that the size of the volume should now be thus of the 500 Gb partition, the space problem would be solved quickly !

Click to expand...

You'll have to boot the Mac from the Snow Leopard DVD (OS X 10.6.3) and run Disk Utility from the DVD. From Disk Utility you can expand the Macintosh HD partition to fill the entire drive. Being new to the Mac operating system you may have to do a bit of Googling to find some step by step instructions. Disk Utility on the Mac is similar to the Windows Disk Manager, and like it, you must unmount the disk first before doing any major work such as partitioning or formatting.

Also... make a backup first.