My Disk Utility Ate My Harddrive

So i upgraded to leopard over the weekend and thus far have been extremely pleased. I went with the "archive and install method" which fortunately spared me the blue screen of death. But as i sat here with 15 gigs or so backed up from my old system i decided to secure erase it. 4 days and 500,000 files later it was still chugging along. I thought maybe i would just use regular erase it, and then use the disk utility to zero it out.
So i went down to eat dinner with 200 gigs of free space on my imac g5, i came back up an hour later and i have 0, i repeat, 0 gigs of space on my harddrive. I cannot even make a folder on my desktop.
Someone please tell me what went wrong? I need my computer back

if you have no space and nothing to lose format to Zero again. Let us know what happens

in future dont secure erase such a large file - it will take years.

If you are worried about the old data just delete it as normal. Let's say you have 40gig now left on your drive.

Go to disk utility and create a disk image that is, say 39 gig, it will take a couple of hours but once finished delete the new disk image that would have over written your old files.

If you are a spy or paranoid make a copy of a large set of folders to nearly fill up your disk again. Then erase this lot as normal.

All that overwritting is just as secure but with less problems.

Hope this helps - have you got a back-up?

What state is your system in? Are you able to log in?