Missing HDD space

Ok I hate my first post to be asking for help but...

I have a PowerMac G5 1.6 GHz 512 RAM OS X 10.4.8 80GB HDD
there seems to be some missing space on my HD. I know there is space taken up on all HDs from components or what not, thats not the case here. I had about 20 GBs of space left on my HD. I empty the trash on a daily basis. it was empty at the time. I tried to download a 5 GB file and i got a prompt telling me I was low on disk space. I thought "wow, how big is this file"? It was only 5 GBs. So i checked my HD space and it said i had 64 MBs left. 3 hours before I had 20. I tried to trash some videos and other things and got up to 6 GBs yesterday. now to day it tells me I have 5.6 GBs and I have done nothing between now and then. Is there any way to see what is taking up my HD space. or dose any one have an idea? Thanx.

Try Omni DiskSweeper, I think there is a free trial, it'll break down all you folders and sub folders by size so you can see where all your space is.

Get it here

That seemed to work. Thanx! There is this file that is real big and it is right on the money size wise of what I am missing. It is the highlighted one in the pic. Should this be that big, or could it be my problem? I don't think a single system file would be that big.

just did a google search on that file name "windowserver_last" + "mac" + "space".

everything i looked at said it was safe to delete.

not sure if it will come back though...

I would use Terminal and use the command;

tail 1000 /var/log/windowserver_last.log

This might give you a clue to what it is recording. I would also reboot the machine too.

deleting it did the trick. tail 1000 /var/log/windowserver_last.log did not do much. i tried to open the file and as I suspected it's size made it REALLY slow. but the first little bit i got a screen shot of. thanx for the help every one^^
[img=http://img292.imageshack.us/img292/4898/picture2xv3.th.png]

When I did a tail on my windowserver_last.log I saw the same message as your jpg and and a few others that made no sense to me. Also the message only appeared for a few particular days, not yesterday for instance. My file was really small too.

Perhaps some process was just stuck and kept feeding that file. If it happens again do the tail command to see if something else is writing to the file. That [639] number might related to the process id writing to the file. That could lead you to the culprit.