Where did my hard drive space go?

[elliotay]

So I've just recently noticed that I'm down to like 400MB of hard drive space on my iBook. It has a 10GB hard drive. I don't have any movies on it and no more then maybe 20 mp3s. I do run virtual pc on it and save an image of that when I'm done, but that only takes up 1.4 GB. Where did the rest of it go? If anyone knows how to tell what's taking up the majority of space on your hard drive could you please help?

Thanks

[beez7777]

underpants gnomes?

[funkywhat2]

do you do a lot of web surfing? if so, try clearing your cookies and temporary internet files (that's what we call them in the pc world:) :) :) )

[mmcneil]

Have you rebooted? You could have a lot of swapspace dedicated - VPC is particularly bad about demanding lots of memory which results in lots of swapspace (depending upon your memory configuration). I have 1G RAM and VPC still gets me into lots of swapspace.

[MacBandit]

I usually just start at the main window of the hard drive and get info for each folder and track it down based on the sizes.

[Hemingray]

Easier yet, to find any huge files, you could just do a Command+F, and (assuming you are using Jaguar with the new Finder Search), just go down to the "Add Criteria..." pop-up menu and select "Size" and then select "is greater than" and then enter the KB value.

[cb911]

i had a similar thing happen to me on my TiBook awhile back. you just have to go through all the folders and trash everything you don't need.
or depending on how much junk you have on your HD maybe it would be easier to back up everything you need, then format you HD and start over. that's what i did when i ran out of space and i partitioned as well. don't know how i ever survived so long without all those partitions...:D :) :p

[MacBandit]

Originally posted by Hemingray
Easier yet, to find any huge files, you could just do a Command+F, and (assuming you are using Jaguar with the new Finder Search), just go down to the "Add Criteria..." pop-up menu and select "Size" and then select "is greater than" and then enter the KB value.

This will work if it is made up of huge files but it could just as easily thousands of 1meg and less files.

[Hemingray]

Originally posted by MacBandit


This will work if it is made up of huge files but it could just as easily thousands of 1meg and less files.

If I was going to squeeze every last bit of free disk space I could, I would use your method. In this case, though, it sounds like he needs to filter through the bigger stuff first to reclaim the majority of the space. Going through the folders manually is almost always the best option, but it's also the most time consuming.