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Disk Utility "Erase Free Space" used up my whole HD and stalled! HELP!

R

riklrask

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Dec 26, 2008
7
0
I used to love my mac, but right now i hate it so much.

So i've just been having a tonne of problems and now i have a huge one.

I went into disk utility to "erase free space" on my Internal HD and my 79GB that i did have free was slowly eaten up while disk utility ran. Now it reached "Creating temporary file" and stalled leaving me with ZERO space on my hard drive. it is completely filled up and disk utility isn't working. wtf?

can someone please please please help me out?
 
S

shwc

macrumors regular
Jul 2, 2005
205
1
boot off of install disks.
Trash the temp file.
I believe that "erase free space" writes over the free space by means of a temporary file which is then deleted. Not sure why the process stalled for you.
 
R

Rijksband

macrumors newbie
Jul 11, 2007
2
0
What file? Where?

I am having the same problem! I'm trying to use spotlight to search for files made today...this stupid diskutil has filled up my disk too! How do I get rid of this temp file?

Whats the file name? File extension? How can I search for it?
 
M

MachadoAMDG

macrumors newbie
Dec 27, 2012
1
0
Almost 4 years after the original poster I did the same thing and you guys saved my butt! Thanks for the suggestions and the omnidisksweeper is a great tool. I was able to complete what I was trying to do when erasing my free space with the omnidisksweeper. I didn't understand fully what the computer was doing when erasing free space. I will figure out what I am doing better before I do anything next time. Thanks again, you guys rock.
 
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