[mainmanvern]

hi

i am pretty new to macs... i have been on PC for 6 years so this may be a fairly obvious problem!

i ran diskwarrior 3 on my G3 ibook as a preventive measure to rebuild the desktop (i think that this is the same as defragging on a PC). it was running from a CD that i made with bootCD. everything went fine but when i checked the Hard Drive it has gone from having 17.07GB of free space on a 37.25GB disc to having only 3.22GB free space.

i have searched for any back ups that Diskwarrior may have made in the folders specified by their help files (Damaged Items and Rescued Items) but have come up with nothing. i did a search for large files but the biggest single file on the disk is 655MB

if i select the Hard Drive icon on the desktop and get info it says its used 34.03GB on the disk but if i open it and select all the files and folders inside and get info it says Size 20.18GB which is what it should be.

Are there any hidden files? or anything else i can try?

thanks

[dtriska]

Just so you know, directory rebuilding is not the same as volume defragmenting.

As for your problem, yes, Mac OS X has hidden files although they shouldn't take up the large space you seem to be missing. I suggest you take a look at OmniDiskSweeper. This app will show you where all of your space is being used, and whether you can safely delete the offending files.

[bergy]

I hope this helps ... I had a similar situation .. I didn't know where all my hard disk space was going ...
It might depend if you have other accounts on your computer.

If you open your hard drive icon and check folder sizes, it will only add up the open account. Permissions will not allow it to add up for instance other users itunes folders

If you have other accounts, you cannot get their true size from your account. In this case the get info from the hard drive icon is probably correct .. it was in my case

OmniDisk will only give you the open accounts info as well.

I booted into 9, and checked the other user accounts from there ....
Same thing ... open hard drive icon ...
View options ... size

[Groovy]

Originally posted by bergy:
If you have other accounts, you cannot get their true size from your account.

Hmm... not here. If an admin account or root does the sweep I can see it all. (I just tried it)

Non admin/root accounts can't. (I just tried that also)

[mainmanvern]

hi

i ran OmniDisk on the drive but it just came back with 20.2GB found. Which is what it should be.

So i rebooted from Diskwarrior and ran it again but found no options to delete back up files.

i have just found a Diskwarrior forum so i am going to ask there.

Thanks for your help.