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Lost 5 gigs??

U

uhlawboi80

macrumors 6502
Original poster
today i was noticing that i had only 20 gigs left in my 35 gig partition..the thing is i only have like 8 gigs of stuff on that partition...and now when you add up the "disk space" of my partitions, the OS isnt accouting for 5.5 gigs of disk space 😕 im not sure what happened or when this started...but i want my 5.5 gigs back 😡

i looked and didnt see any apple tech articles on this happening...anyone have any ideas???
 
check you deleted users folder, i deleted my old college roomate's account and like 50 mb of stuff was a 8 gig dmg file! i had to restart and login as root to delete it to. never figured out the cause either. oh well.
 
-uhlawboi80

How old is your drive?

It sound like your drive is beginning to fail.

HD's are designed to fail gradually from the outside of the platters to the inside - where your system files and lower partition numbers are.

If you notice a shrinkage of capacity, your drive may be trying to tell you something...
 
Here's the deal: you think it's a 60 GB drive, but it's really a 55.89 GB disk. Why? Because when they say it's 60 gig, they count up 1 MB as 1000 KB, and 1 GB as 1000 MB, when the actual number is 1 MB to 1024 KB and 1 GB to 1024 MB. These '24's look small, but they add up and they eventually make a 60 GB drive a 55 GB drive.

The thing is, it didn't really matter when the drives were small because the differences in the numbers weren't too big, but as the drives have become larger, the difference is VERY noticable. For example, a 120 GB drive is 111 GB. So a whole 9 GB is "gone".

And just so you know, this isn't Apple who is giving phoney numbers, it's the hard drive makers... so it's the same on Mac, Windoze, Linux, or anything out there.



irmongoose
 
i will try deleting any deleted users...the HD is about 8 months old...so it damn well best not be failing!

and i understand that drive sizes arent actually what they claim to be because of the sizing system...but my drive totals somewhere near 33.7 gigs out of 40...that much is not lost to the "missing 24" or drive formatting to the best of my knowledge
 
Originally posted by uhlawboi80
i will try deleting any deleted users...the HD is about 8 months old...so it damn well best not be failing!

and i understand that drive sizes arent actually what they claim to be because of the sizing system...but my drive totals somewhere near 33.7 gigs out of 40...that much is not lost to the "missing 24" or drive formatting to the best of my knowledge
Click to expand...
Ok If a 120 gig hard drive loses 9 gigs because of this practice of omiting the 24s then a drive half it's size would lose half as much or 4.5 gigs and some change. Your not missing much of anything.
 
ok macpoops...40 gigs is 1/3 of 120. therefore i should lose only 3 gigs. i missing about twice that much. SO, your reply isnt very valid.
 
Originally posted by applemacdude
rebuild the desktop.. that might help
Click to expand...

Ah, an OS 9 user on the boards. How I long for the daays that I could fix everything through extension manager and rebuilding the desktop. The good old days. 🙂

Regards,
Gus
 
Originally posted by Macpoops
Ok If a 120 gig hard drive loses 9 gigs because of this practice of omiting the 24s then a drive half it's size would lose half as much or 4.5 gigs and some change. Your not missing much of anything.
Click to expand...

It doesn't work that way. Also as stated your math is incorrect. Another 120gig drive could lose 12gigs and yet another could lose 4 gigs. The poing is the amount lost to formatting is not directly proportionate to the size of the drive.


uhlawboi80 did you get information on each of your folders starting with your main drive and then working your way in to determine that all the sizes add up to what the disk size you think you should have?
 
well the drive affected is my 35 gig partition...added up, yes. the folder present plus available space add up to the "available disk space" but for a parition of 35 gigs to only have 29.48 gigs available seems fishy to me still. the OS partition is hunky dory.
 
Originally posted by uhlawboi80
well the drive affected is my 35 gig partition...added up, yes. the folder present plus available space add up to the "available disk space" but for a parition of 35 gigs to only have 29.48 gigs available seems fishy to me still. the OS partition is hunky dory.
Click to expand...

Ah but you have just answered the question. Your OS partition is probably the first partition on the drive so therfore it go it's allocated amount. Now the other partition the one with the missing space is the one that uses the rest of the drive. Well the rest of the drive once formatted was actually smaller then the preformatted size so the partittion just used whatever space it could get and therefore you are in actuality actually seeing the results of difference in space in a preformated and a formated drive.

Also how did you format the drive? If you used HFS it's possible that you lost more space to formatting then you would have with HFS+.
 
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