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d4nth3m4n · Sep 1, 2004, 03:05 PM

ok, first lemme show you this pic-

ok, in the upper left is the get info of my hd. upper right is the nine items (as you can see) at the root of my hd and their respective size.

where in the hell is the rest of the hd space if the 9 items only take up 23.something gb? i thought maybe it was a cache thing, so i ran both cocktail and panther cache cleaner to no avail.

oh, and this is a partition (of a 120gb drive) on my parents sawtooth running panther.4

what gives here? am i missing something?

oh, i know, i also made the invisible visible (i KNOW!) and kinda poked around there as well. nothing doing there either, except trashes (or was it .trashes?) wouldn't cough up its size in a reasonable timeframe for my ADD. so who knows.

CatOne · Sep 1, 2004, 03:09 PM

Originally posted by d4nth3m4n:
ok, first lemme show you this pic-

ok, in the upper left is the get info of my hd. upper right is the nine items (as you can see) at the root of my hd and their respective size.

where in the hell is the rest of the hd space if the 9 items only take up 23.something gb? i thought maybe it was a cache thing, so i ran both cocktail and panther cache cleaner to no avail.

oh, and this is a partition (of a 120gb drive) on my parents sawtooth running panther.4

what gives here? am i missing something?

oh, i know, i also made the invisible visible (i KNOW!) and kinda poked around there as well. nothing doing there either, except trashes (or was it .trashes?) wouldn't cough up its size in a reasonable timeframe for my ADD. so who knows.

Your swap files will take up some space. Probably about a GB (depends on how much RAM you have).

.Trashes is your system trash. Whatever you see in your trash can in the dock, is located in .Trashes.

Not sure how much extra stuff is in the root folder, but note that ALL the contents of things like /usr and /var are NOT included in the totals of the stuff you've selected.

I'd suggest you quit worrying about it. If I see a "my system broke!" post here during cleanup you attempt, I'm not gonna help you

d4nth3m4n · Sep 1, 2004, 03:11 PM

ram is 832mb.

i agree that some of it may be used by the system, but 8 gb? surely that is a little odd. thats a *lot* of space.

ManOfSteal · Sep 1, 2004, 03:11 PM

1.) Have you restarted?

2.) Have you tried "Repair Disk" via Disk Utility? DiskWarrior?

Xeo · Sep 1, 2004, 03:13 PM

How many users on the system? If there is another user, the space could be there. I don't think it can calculate the size of directories it can't read. Also, there are more hidden directories that you aren't factoring in like /bin and such, but I don't think that accounts for 8 Gigs since a new install is only 3 or 4 Gigs total. Virtual memory can take up a few Gigs, and I'm not sure that the cleaner apps get rid of that or not.

Just a few thoughts.

d4nth3m4n · Sep 1, 2004, 03:25 PM

Originally posted by manofsteal:
1.) Have you restarted?

2.) Have you tried "Repair Disk" via Disk Utility? DiskWarrior?

yes yes yes yes

ManOfSteal · Sep 1, 2004, 03:28 PM

Originally posted by d4nth3m4n:
yes yes yes yes

Was it as good for you, as it was for me?

d4nth3m4n · Sep 1, 2004, 03:28 PM

Originally posted by Xeo:
How many users on the system? If there is another user, the space could be there. I don't think it can calculate the size of directories it can't read.

well, you can go ahead and lock this thread down. you were exactly right. it can't calculate the size of the locked folders in other users' home directories.

well, i feel silly�. i had completely forgotten that i had backed up my family guy collection on my parents comp. in fact, i had forgotten i had ever even logged in since the install.

thanks everyone. *slinks back to the lounge*

d4nth3m4n · Sep 1, 2004, 03:29 PM

Originally posted by manofsteal:
Was it as good for you, as it was for me?

no

ManOfSteal · Sep 1, 2004, 03:51 PM

Originally posted by d4nth3m4n:
no

wataru · Sep 1, 2004, 03:52 PM

OmniDiskSweeper is a good app to use in a situation like this. I believe it asks for authentication, so it can evaluate the size of everything on the disks.

ManOfSteal · Sep 1, 2004, 04:18 PM

Originally posted by wataru:
OmniDiskSweeper is a good app to use in a situation like this. I believe it asks for authentication, so it can evaluate the size of everything on the disks.

Terminal can't do this?

wataru · Sep 1, 2004, 04:43 PM

I'm sure it can. OmniDiskSweeper is just nicer.

yukon · Sep 4, 2004, 10:32 PM

I've found gigs in a few "orphaned" trash folders, the trashes of other users and "trashes" from previous installs that were replaced with new folders. Might want to log in as different users to see what's left in the trash, or if you have terminal skills you can find the sizes for the trash folders....check the ones in the root of the drive, check the sizes for those folders.

There's a "show dotfiles" setting for the finder somewhere....might be tinkertool though....I kept it off because every folder had a .ds_store that bugged me.

nforcer · Sep 5, 2004, 02:35 AM

It would be cool if Apple added a feature to the Accounts system preference that let you specify the maximum amount of space that you would want to allot to a non-admin user. Then when that user logged in and looked at the HD size, instead of seeing the amount of free space on the device, he would see maxSpecifiedSize - userFolderSize space available.

Of course there would be warnings in place to prevent an admin from taking a user account that was using almost all allotted space and decreasing it even more, thus causing the user to lose data.

nforcer · Sep 5, 2004, 02:38 AM

Originally posted by manofsteal:
1.) Have you restarted?

I second the restart suggestion. I can reclaim about 1.5 GB of HD space after a couple weeks worth of uptime and hard use.

yukon · Sep 6, 2004, 07:40 PM

Ah, I should have posted this....great utility, the more users, the more encouragement, the more development, the more happy I am

http://www.derlien.com/diskinventoryx/

screenshot (remove "thumb" for full size)-
http://www.derlien.com/diskinventory...shot1Thumb.jpg

It's helped me clear over 40gb I'm sure, calls your attention to the biggest or the messiest files (the biggest blocks, or the areas with thousands of tiny blocks). I'd bet it can't see files it doesn't have access to, hey, something for me to suggest to the developer.

bbales · Sep 6, 2004, 09:11 PM

Many months ago, I used carbon copy cloner to try to clone my laptop hard drive. I did something wrong, and instead of using my external HD, it tried to copy the laptop TO the laptop (it didn't work ...)

Somehow in there, many many gigs of space got taken up in hidden files that I would NEVER have found.

And, unfortunately, I do not exactly remember where they were. But they're little used files in very strange spots, hidden files, really. Have you done any cloning? Have you done anything different -- such as making backups or anything -- in which you could possibly have copied very large files somewhere?

Gavin · Sep 6, 2004, 09:47 PM

That's cool.
Thanks

yukon · Sep 7, 2004, 12:08 AM

bbales, I believe I've remembered how I found the hidden trashed files. I tried using FileBuddy (which used to be awesome back in System 7), and a couple other utilities, but they weren't that helpful. Instead, I used the OS X finder search utilitiy (of all things), logged in as root, set it to Visibility: Invisible and Size: Greater than: 10000k, found a bunch of very large invisible files.

bbales · Sep 7, 2004, 08:21 AM

Yukon, I had to have help from a person in charge of help over at the CCC web site. I believe it involed using terminal, to locate the hidden files. I think there are still a few of them in there, but the huge ones (like -- my whole hard drive at that point!) got cleaned out. It was quite a mess. And all because I had made one small error...