Where did all my Hard Drive space go?

Did you do an Archive and Install? In that case, there should be an Old Systems folder on the root of your HD, which you can delete (when you're sure everything works properly), that should clear a couple of GBs...

There's also an issue some has experienced that Tiger slowly eats up HD space if you just keep it running (some unidentified temp files or virtual memory is not released properly) and a simple restart might give you upwards of 1-2 GB back (at least at my iBook with a 60 GB HD) after 2-5 days uptime...

You might also check and see if your HD is formatted with HFS+ or plain HFS. If it is HFS, then a bunch of hard drive space is being wasted. To fix it, you would have to backup your hard drive, wipe it with Disk Utility (choosing Extended), then reinstall everything.

Also, throw away all the language stuff you will never use (google it for a tutorial and you may find one), and any other unnecessary files. BUT, what I REALLY suggest you do if you want to keep this computer is to simply buy a much bigger hard drive off ebay (80-120GB). This should only cost you $40-$70. Then repeat the above steps about backing up and reformatting and reinstalling.

I would suggest you do the following:

1. Start up with the Tiger disk and open Disk Utility from one of the menus.
2. Reformat and zero the drive formatting it as MacOS Extended (Journaled)
3. Start the Tiger installer and do a custom install.
4. Choose only to install the printer drivers of the brand of printer you have/might get in the future (you can always use the disk with the printer if you don't install the drivers now, so don't worry)
5. Choose to only install English (if that's what you want, or maybe English and a few more). By removing all languages except English, I have ~2GB more space.
6. Get an external firewire enclosure and a 3.5" hard drive (cheaper then buying them together, usually). 10GB isn't really enough to get by with anymore, especially if you do ANY iMovie, etc. A 30 Minute movie can take up 10GB...


*Remember* when you reformat the drive, you delete all files on the drive and start from scratch. Back-up and files and applications that you have installed/made before reformatting!

In hindsight, it may have been better to customize your installation and turn off all the foreign language support in the install. DeLocalizer is shareware that can remove foreign language files after the fact - however I don't know if it is Tiger compatible. It usually reclaims about 800 Mb of space.

Search for it and other utilities through http://www.versiontracker.com

You can reclaim a bit of space (1 - 10 Mb) by going into the OS9 System Folder, Preferences, and deleting the cache folders for Internet Explorer and/or Netscape.

Monolingual is Tiger aware and recently stripped 1GB (!!) of language data from a fresh Tiger install.

hey,

i had a space issue a lil' while ago too..

https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/126613/

that's my thread. some of the apps have already been mentioned, but it's still worth a read.

Wait did you just upgrade Panther to Tiger or do a clean install? I'm guessing you upgraded if you still have an OS 9 folder...

I've found that clean installs take less room because you're getting rid of all the temporary files, etc. of panther.

If he ever needs it back, you could just install 9 again, someone here will show you how if you don't know!

You would need an OS 9 cd to reinstall OS 9, but Tiger (and Panther for that matter) install a version of OS 9 called Classic when installing them. But you can't boot into OS 9 using the folder Classic (afaik).

As to backing up using an ipod--I have had trouble with files shuffled between macs and pcs. Sometimes something gets messed up in the translation. Maybe someone can shed more light on how to do it safely, but I would just get an external hard drive like mentioned above and WAIT until I had it to do any wiping or reinstalling.