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RobOnTheCape · Mar 15, 2004, 09:09 AM

Yesterday I had about 4.5 gigs of space available, but after a few smaller downloads(the machine started to slow down considerably as well), my daughter on AIM - I woke up to find ony 300 meg of space left.

I did a seach of all downloads done in past few days - nothing considerable, but deleted them anyways - ran diskwarrior - and then ran Norton's with no errors showing up.

It appears that some hard drive space is not showing up as available, but is.

Any ideas?

Thanks

philzilla · Mar 15, 2004, 09:52 AM

what's in here? Finder > cmd+g > /var/vm

if there's loads of swap files, you just need to reboot to reclaim the space.

RobOnTheCape · Mar 15, 2004, 09:59 AM

I clicked the finder - press command-g - and nothing happened. searched for /"/var/vm" and nothing came up.

philzilla · Mar 15, 2004, 10:05 AM

my bad, it's shift+cmd+g, or Go > Go To Folder from the menu bar. /var/vm is a hidden system folder, so you won't find it in a normal search

RobOnTheCape · Mar 15, 2004, 10:09 AM

Thanks for the quick replies - found the folder, but there are only five folders, and collectively contain only 300 megs. This isn't nearly what I lost.

Toyin · Mar 15, 2004, 10:19 AM

Are you using Filevault? When you're running low on disk space, you can get into problems reclaiming unsused disk space.

philzilla · Mar 15, 2004, 10:29 AM

did you reboot at all, since noticing the space was zapped?

RobOnTheCape · Mar 15, 2004, 10:39 AM

I don't use filevault, and have rebooted a few times. Once after running Diskwarrior. btw - using 10.2.8.

Toyin · Mar 15, 2004, 01:53 PM

I think you need to search through all your invisible files and see if there are any large files (ie command-f in the finder. Search visibility=invisible, size file greater than 10,000KB). You can also check, this thread. It mentions the var/vm files again, but maybe you could contact the originator and see if they have any other ideas.

RobOnTheCape · Mar 16, 2004, 01:57 PM

Well I've went through all that was mentioned here without success. I'm wondering if a re-install is the ony answer.

DaveGee · Mar 16, 2004, 02:24 PM

Originally posted by RobOnTheCape:
Well I've went through all that was mentioned here without success. I'm wondering if a re-install is the ony answer.

Daughter eh?

Well on a hunch make sure some form of 'music sharing' 'file sharing' etc software hasn't been running... Kaza (sp?) BitTorrent etc...

Do a find for

'files ending in' = .mp3 and visibility = 'visible & invisible'

Also you do a search for files larger than XXX-KB just to see if that space was being taken up by a single file. It'll require some detective work to see if the files that it finds are correct (and the correct size) but look for stuff like 'last modified on' etc and the files location.

4GB is an awful lot of free space to disappear overnight.. Shouldn't be too hard to find.

Dave

RobOnTheCape · Mar 17, 2004, 07:45 AM

nothing. Went through everything. Files down to 1000kadded in the last few days - visible and invisible.
Something is wrong. Kids work on Word is unable to be saved unless the machine is rebooted before they start there work. Box appears that says there is not enough memory or disk space...

Also - Entourage and Explorer are crashing as well as other programs.

Again - have run Diskwarrior and Nortons which after fixing problems say everything is fine. But it's not.