[chasg]

Hi All, I'm trying to resolve a discrepancy as to the amount of free space I should have on my hard drive.

My iBook is reported, via a "get info", as having a 27.94Gb hard disk, with 23.19Gb used (leaving 4.74Gb free).

If I open the hard drive, and select everything in there (which, to the best of my understanding, should actually be everything on the drive, not including items in the trash, which is empty, by the way), and then do a "get info" on that, I get a reported size of 21.96Gb.

That, to my mind, is quite a discrepancy. I'm assuming that some of that is being used by virtual memory. What bothers me about that assumption is that, besides Safari, no other apps are open, and this computer has 640Mb of RAM. Why would the OS need a gig of space on the hard drive for? So, I'm going to assume that not all of this space is being taken up by VM.

So, where is my missing space? I'd love to free it up, could anyone help me out? (or can anyone definitively tell me that my assumptions are incorrect?)

Thanks in advance,

Chas

[philzilla]

swap files. reboot and report back.

[madmacgames]

if you select everything in the hard drive, you are only selecting the visible folders. The BSD subsystem is completely hidden or invisible in the finder (and for good reason). So selecting everything in the hard drive would only give info on what is visible. To get the BSD subsystem added in, and an accurate count of what is available and used, you would have to do a get info on the hard drive icon. I don't exactly remember how much space the BSD subsystem takes up, but if you have the complete subsystem installed (I don't recall if the complete subsystem comes pre-installed or just a partial subsystem is pre-installed), somewhere around 1 gig sounds about right, I think.

Plus as philzilla mentioned, swap files will take up space (which are also invisible in the finder).

*edit* I am on Panther and have the complete BSD subsystem installed. I just made hidden files visible to the finder and did a get info on only the hidden files/folders. At the moment they take up 930MB.