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Disk Utility- Restoring space?

D

Drewsome

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Apr 1, 2012
1
0
A few days ago I was erasing free space on my Mac OSX 10.5.8 via Disk Utility. All was going smoothly until what seemed to be the very end of the operation when Disk Utility became unresponsive and quit. Since then, the memory on my Mac has been 232 GB with zero available as apparently 232 GB are "used". Is there a way to restore the memory I seemed to have lost during the erasure of free space? I read a help article that mentioned the amount of space prior to and after the free space erase would be the same, so I'm confused as to why my memory is missing. Any explanations/remedies would be appreciated.

Side note: I browsed the forum, but I came across no threads that addressed this issue specifically.
 
1) Have you tried rebooting your machine?

2) Why didi you want to erase free space? Why via Disc Utility and not via Finder?
 
Gregg2 said:
@John T: How do you erase free space via Finder?
Click to expand...

As advised in the Disc Utility help file - "You can also erase free space when you empty the Trash in the Finder. Choose Finder > Secure Empty Trash."
 
John T said:
As advised in the Disc Utility help file - "You can also erase free space when you empty the Trash in the Finder. Choose Finder > Secure Empty Trash."
Click to expand...
That's good for the future. However, if you haven't been doing that, you might want to erase the free space.
 
John T said:
As advised in the Disc Utility help file - "You can also erase free space when you empty the Trash in the Finder. Choose Finder > Secure Empty Trash."
Click to expand...

When executing SET, the message says "Are you sure you want to erase the items in the Trash permanently using Secure Empty Trash?"

In spite of what DU Help says, I don't think that's the same as wiping all free space. It only acts on items presently in the Trash.

Reading the whole page in DU help, the first paragraph seems to support my conclusion. The last sentence, quoted above, seems to be an abbreviated summary that doesn't tell the whole story. ???

I guess the real test would be to execute SET and then try to recover an older file.
 
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