[royboy]

OK, could someone help me understand this sequence of events:

G3 400MHz iMac
320 mb RAM
9.5 gb hard drive
OSX 10.2.8

my hard drive has been getting a bit full (digital photos mostly the culprit), with about 1 gb left free according to the line at the top of the folder windows when I've looked at it lately.

today I knocked the power cube for an external firewire hard drive out of the power strip and got a message that I should have put the icons in the trash and may have lost info (doubt if this is an issue, but it did happen)

I was in the midst of copying some photo files and noticed that things were running very slow, and in fact I had to force-quit Toast Lite to get the spinning wheel to go away.

things were still slow and eventually I rebooted the computer.

when it rebooted I first noted that my desktop icons were huge. same for the dock size, and the dock was full of default icons, rather than the ones I had placed there. the clock was in 24 hour style rather than 12 hr as it had been. I conclude I lost a bunch of settings. also see that some internal program preferences were off - the font for Text edit had switched - I'm guessing to default - haven't clearly noted any others yet but wouldn't be surprised to find some.

the amount of HD space available now shows as 600 mb. This didn't seem right so I added up folder sizes in the hard drive window and they only total 7.2 gb.

copied to CD and erased about 250 mb of photos.

now I thought to go to disk utility. noted that despite the HD folder only totalling 7.2 gb, disk utility says I have only 800 mb left open. repaired permissions on the hard drive. after doing that I looked at Disk Utilities info window and it shows only 390 mb left free.

help! what's up here???

[Detrius]

A 10GB hard drive isn't big enough to run OS X *and* store your photo collection. There are files that you can't see in the Finder. You need a bigger hard drive. They aren't very expensive. The only difficulty with your machine is getting data from the old one to the new one. You may want to invest in a FireWire cabinet as well.

BTW, you lost all of your settings because your hard drive was full (0MB available) when you rebooted.

[royboy]

thanks for the response - and, OK, I was getting the picture that the photos weren't going to fit pretty soon - it's just that I thought I had most of a gig left on the HD.

so ... now I have copied my photo files to my external 80 gb firewire drive and erased them from the iMac. the HD window shows folders totalling 3.9 gb and Disk Utility shows 5.8 gb occupied. does it make sense that there is nearly 2 gb of invisible files? (I am surprised that there would be so much, but then again, since moving to OSX, I have had a much reduced awareness of the inner structure of my mac)

and is there a relatively easy way to recover my lost settings?? I use Carbon Copy Cloner to back up my user file daily and my whole HD weekly - and today was the day for the whole HD.

Roy