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You are here: MacNN Forums > Software - Troubleshooting and Discussion > macOS > Really super wierd thing happening on my macbook

Really super wierd thing happening on my macbook
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blueleaf
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Mar 25, 2007, 01:52 PM
 
So my macbook was running extremely low on disk space, so i decided to delete some movies and I freed up about 3 GB of space. This was maybe an hour ago. Just now I looked in my finder and it says Zero GB availiable! I have done absolutely nothing, just browsing the web...is that wierd? Any help or suggestions would be appreciated.
     
mindwaves
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Mar 25, 2007, 02:22 PM
 
Do either one of the following:

1) Option click the Finder icon in the Dock and "Force Quit."
2) Logout and relogin
3) Reboot
     
blueleaf  (op)
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Mar 25, 2007, 02:59 PM
 
OK, I did that...now it says I have 1.45GB of free space...which is still a hell of a lot less than I should have. Does anyone have any explanation for why it went so far down?
     
jaudrius
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Mar 25, 2007, 03:06 PM
 
Maybe you forgot to Empty the Trash?
Deleting the files is not enough, they are sent to trash and still takes up the disk space.
     
memory-minus
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Mar 25, 2007, 03:11 PM
 
Keep an eye on it for the next few minutes. See if it gradually drops. It could be a log file filling up your hard drive.

Quit all open applications and open /Applications/Utilities/Activity Monitor. Show "All Processes" and sort by % CPU. See if anything is using more than a few % CPU cycles. If you're not doing anything else on the computer, no background process should really be consistently taking up any more than 5 to 10% of available CPU cycles at any given time.

If syslogd is taking a lot of CPU, you might try clearing out your log file directories. I once had a machine I was working on that lost several MB per minute. Turns out permissions on a log file had gotten screwed up and syslogd was no longer able to write to it, so it was writing an error message to system.log and filling it up.

BE CAREFUL WITH THE FOLLOWING COMMANDS AND TYPE THEM EXACTLY AS THEY ARE WRITTEN HERE. FAILURE TO DO SO COULD CAUSE YOU TO LOSE DATA OR ERASE YOUR ENTIRE HARD DRIVE. I AM NOT RESPONSIBLE IF YOU SCREW THIS UP.

 
     
blueleaf  (op)
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Mar 25, 2007, 03:16 PM
 
Yes, I did empty the trash..

Alright, so I just wated a couple minutes and it went up to 1.7 GB...So I'm assuming it's all good. As long as it doesn't go down again for no reason, I'm not going to bother with those terminal commands. And syslogd wasn't even on the activity monitor menu.

Thanks for your help.
     
jmiddel
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Mar 25, 2007, 06:13 PM
 
Blueleaf, You also must realize that having so little space left on your HD is quite dangerous, it can actually cause nasty crashes that are difficult to resolve because of directory problems. You should always have a minimum of 10% of total capacity free at all times.
     
Northeastern292
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Mar 25, 2007, 07:13 PM
 
Originally Posted by jmiddel View Post
Blueleaf, You also must realize that having so little space left on your HD is quite dangerous, it can actually cause nasty crashes that are difficult to resolve because of directory problems. You should always have a minimum of 10% of total capacity free at all times.
So that's the reason why I am so nervous having a full hard drive.
The Mac Collection:

Power Mac G4 Sawtooth at 450MHz, Power Mac G4 Gigabit Ethernet at 400MHz, three Power Mac FW800's at 1.0GHz, MacBook Pro at 2.0GHz, my late father's G3 iMac at 350MHz, an iMac at 500MHz, a PowerBook G4 (12-inch VGA) and a PowerBook 170
     
ginoledesma
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Mar 25, 2007, 07:32 PM
 
One of the common culprits is the virtual memory swap files piling up. Check out the contents of /var/vm/. If you see a lot of them (e.g. > 5 swap files), try rebooting to reclaim that space (Mac OS X may be using too much because of some misbehaving apps and memory leaks). Deleting them while using your computer may cause it to misbehave.
     
Gavin
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Mar 26, 2007, 09:17 AM
 
Also check out the Quicktime and Java caches in your ~/Library/Caches folder . These can get huge over time just by web surfing.
You can take the dude out of So Cal, but you can't take the dude outta the dude, dude!
     
   
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