[dANb]

I'm going nuts here.

I have B&W G3 PowerMac 450 MHz, 512 MB RAM, OSX 10.3.4
I have an ATA 70 GB Hard disk with 2 partitions 35 GB each, one is the system disk which giving me a major headache.
Last night I ran DiskWarrior since I felt the machine is a little unstable.
When I gave the "Re-Build" command to DiskWarrior I got a message that this can not be complete
since my disk is almost full. Now to my knowledge this 35 GB disk partition is only 8-9 GB full.
I re-booted and to my surprise the finder window indicates that I have only 41.7 MB !!! available.
When I choose all the items on this partition and do a "get info" the calculated size shown is still 9 GB.
But the machine act like it really choke up with space giving me low disk space warning and crashing applications.
Please please please can someone tell me what's going on and what should I do now????

Thanks

[reader50]

Grab TinkerTool or Onyx and use one to make all files visible in the Finder.

Once you have the Finder set to show all files, check these locations for large abandoned files:

/VolumeName/Temporary Items/ (used by OS9)
/VolumeName/private/tmp/ (used by QuickTime & SoftwareUpdate)
/VolumeName/private/var/tmp/ (used by the system)

Be careful with /private/var/temp, this folder contains mount points and other important things that must not be deleted. Only delete large stray files, do not delete folders or any file less than 10 MB. When looking over /private/tmp, be sure to follow subfolders. QuickTime in particular likes to hide trailer downloads there in invisible subfolders.

If that doesn't do it, hit the logfile folders to see if a runaway logfile has grown huge:

/VolumeName/Library/Logs/
/YourHomeFolder/Library/Logs/
/OtherHomeFolders/Library/Logs/
/VolumeName/private/var/log/

Since your test indicated it is not in the regular visible folders, that most likely means the problem file(s) is/are in /private/tmp or /Temporary Items.

[dANb]

Thanks reader50 for your reply.
Being so frustrated I decided to run DW again just for the heck of it.
Much to my surprise it was a lot faster and... VOILA IT WORKED!!!
After re-boot the partition indicated the right amount of free / used space.
Thanks again though for your tips, I'll save them for the next rainy day
this old beat up machine throws at me :-)