[LlamaBoy]

I am running 10.3.3, Powerbook 1.25, 80 gig hard drive, FileVault turned on

I recently experienced complete corruption of all my user settings, and no matter what I did (Repair Permissions, boot into Single User and fsck -y, Onyx) at every reboot all my settings would be back to that of a new user.

I took the advice of other users here and created a new Admin account and just copied over all my settings from a backup. All well and good, right? Well the problem was when I tried to delete the 'user.sparseimage' file that had ballooned to 36 gigabytes. Trash of course wouldn't let me delete it as is common, so I force-deleted. After a reboot I discovered that my hard drive is still only showing 2.95 GB free, and the file is lost in computer limbo!

From the Terminal, I run "locate *sparseimage" and it finds:
\Users\.bacarlson\bacarlson.sparseimage
but all attempts to delete it fail because it can't find the file. I have turned on hidden and invisible files, and even "ls -la" cannot find the directory or the file. I ran OmniSweeper and it doesn't report the file size correctly either.

How can I delete this huge 36 gig spareimage file that doesn't seem to exist???

[LlamaBoy]

I forgot to mention that I did turn FileVault OFF and even deleted the old user from NetInfo Manager. Still cannot find the &#*$#$ file.

[Xeo]

"locate" only updates on Saturday nights if your computer is running unless you update it manually.

Try this:

% sudo find / -name "*.sparseimage" -print

See if you find it w/ that.

[LlamaBoy]

You are da' man! I reindexed my computer, and was able to locate the file using your suggestion, and deleted the offending file. Thank you, thank you, thank you!

Originally posted by Xeo:
"locate" only updates on Saturday nights if your computer is running unless you update it manually.

Try this:

% sudo find / -name "*.sparseimage" -print

See if you find it w/ that.