full hard drive, but no files!

hi -

I'm running an old g4 466mghz using os9.1 an osx - tiger i think...

Anyway -
The osx partition reads as having 15gig of info, leaving about 84mgb ! So I'm getting an error saying 'boot disk is nearly full - delete some files' .

however - I don't store much on this drive - I'm basically recording audio files to an external drive, and using the onboard h/drive as operating system...

When I look thru the folders on the osx partition, I se nothing even remotely close to 15gig.....in fact, it looks more like about 5gig....

Help!

Thanks
rob

That could be the swap partition. The OS X needs about 5-15GB to store information when the RAM lacks enough space. This can be stored somewhere else but if you are not a computer savvy, this is not recommended.

Download and Run ONYX and clean up all logs and caches

see if that helps

Tiger has lots of files you cant see. If you only have 85 megabytes free, you don't have enough free space to run anything. You need to keep at least 1 or 2 gigabytes free for virtual memory space.

If you look with Terminal, and go to the root of the drive you will see all the hidden stuff.
cd /
ls -lag
Note: do NOT delete any of this stuff, OS X needs it to run.
You can do as louishen suggests, run Onyx or some other util to clean out log files and caches.

Check out WhatSize. It will tell you what is eating your hard drive space.
http://www.id-design.com/software/whatsize/