My HD Just Filled Up!?!

I own an 80gb MacBook Pro (2Ghz Intel Dual Core), running it with 2Gb Ram and an 500gb External drive which I added 2 days ago, and promptly emptied my hard drive of all photo's music etc and deleted all libraries (iphoto, itunes etc).

I tried to transfer some shots taken tonight into iphoto, whereupon it told me i needed to refresh my thumbnails, which it started to do, then hung because it came across some modified files and didn't like them. Instead of skipping past them, the whole laptop hung, nothing was working and I was forced to hold down the power button to get it to turn off.

The next 2 hours was filled with me trying to get past my password entry screen, eventually letting it shutdown fully (1hr) which obviously reset the issue which was stopping me logging in. The dock was reset to standard, no shortcuts to anything I normally have, and the HD was full. Before, I had about 36gb free, but now it's full, to the brim, zero gb available.

Any suggestions most welcome before I take it back to the store and kick off - which being in Kuwait and being English (and their tech support sucking like a pro on a buy one get one free weekend) I'm not keen on doing.

I don't have any roll-back utilities, can't see anything obvious I can click on to get this back to how it was.

HELP!!

Kind Regards

Matt

mattpargeter@mac.com

srf4real said:

If you can back up files on the external hdd , then erase and install mac osX you should be able to start with a clean slate on the laptop. Did you accidentally archive and install to fill up your drive?

Click to expand...

This is entirely possible (the back up, i don't remember archiving anything, wouldn't know how to if I'm honest). I have 500gb to play with. Do I just copy and paste / drag it over?

see, this is where I get lost because it's my first mac after 20yrs of PC's. I'm looking at the disk utilities but failing with anything I'm trying.

Ok, Copied and pasted the message you posted and it asked me for a password. I have a system password but it wouldn't let me enter it, or anything else. Any other suggestions?

Last login: Wed Oct 25 00:27:46 on console
Welcome to Darwin!
You have new mail.
matt-pargeters-computer:~ mattpargeter$ sudo du -h -d 1 /

We trust you have received the usual lecture from the local System
Administrator. It usually boils down to these three things:

#1) Respect the privacy of others.
#2) Think before you type.
#3) With great power comes great responsibility.

Password:

ok, put my system password in and hit enter and got this....

37M /.Spotlight-V100
0B /.Trashes
2.0K /.vol


mean anything to anyone?

Cheers Yellow, yeah, I figured I'd jumped the gun a little. Ok, I've got 58gb in my users? Am i reading that right? And how the hell do i delete it?

Matt

Password:
37M /.Spotlight-V100
0B /.Trashes
2.0K /.vol
5.1G /Applications
1.5K /automount
6.7M /bin
0B /cores
2.0K /dev
9.6G /Library
2.0K /Network
2.1G /private
4.5M /sbin
1.8G /System
58G /Users
494M /usr
9.5G /Volumes
87G /
matt-pargeters-computer:~ mattpargeter$

no, that command doesn't work. I tried all perameters, first name, with and without last name, with underscores & without, everything, then without the username and just the User ending, both with and without the / after it.

I did empty the trash, and it's totally empty now, I'd wished it was something as simple as that.

Matt

Ok, that worked nicely. Found out that my user had duplicated itself 9 times so I deleted the duplicates and suddenly gained 45gb. Thanks for all your help Yellow, you get a gold star!

Matt