Missing space in HD

my iMac arrived saying it had 298gb, that is just because of the formatting, same on all hard drives, and all OSs i think,

as for the other 30gb, that is a bit strange....

...if i remember correctly leopard took up about 6... but i really cant think where else your space could have gone...

Well a 320GB hard drive should yield about 298GiB. Hard Drives are advertised with each division equaling 10^3 (1000), the system reports the volume in binary divisions that are 2^10 (1024), so your size is normal.
The rest of the "missing" space is taken up with software.

The new convetion is to assume always the GB uses the mathmatical meaning of the words (GB = 10^9) and GiB using the binary value (GiB = 2^30).

TEG

Try this app.. To find out where the 'missing' GBs have gone ....

You don't get the advertised capacity...this has been discussed a ton. Also, you probably didn't remove unnecessary OS components such as languages and pinter drivers? Those take up a lot of space.

HD manufactuers say that 320 GB = 320 000 000 000 bytes

However computers interpret 1GB as (1024^3) bytes

thus 320 000 000 000 / (1024^3) = 298.02GB which is what your computer reports to be the size of your hard drive

Missing HD Space

Everyone is correct, the advertised space is not what you get. Just how it works and the larger the drive the less the space.

As to the size of Leopard it is I believe around 9 gigs plus all of the other apps. that are on the machine at the time of the upgrade and some of the old OS files

If you are subtracting the 298 from the 320, that's 12 gigs plus around 9 gigs for Leopard and all the other apps and old OS would probably come up to the amount you are missing.

the total capacity is 298 GB as its shown as binary. after formatting its 297.77 GB (rounded up to 297.8 on your yellow note). the minimum space required for a retail Leopard install is 9 GB (doesnt include iLife) which leaves 288.8 GB free. the other 12.4 GB used would be iLife which came with your iMac and the other programs you installed like Office, VLC, Azureus and any others.

did you do an archive and install? if so you will have a previous system folder in Macintosh HD. you can trash it if you like.

also just out of a a few observations from the screen shot. dont run applications out of the disk image. drag the application from the disk image to the applications folder. this applies for zip files too. and for screenshots:

command-shift-3 - whole screen
command-shift-4 - crosshair for custom size (then hold shift, option or command afterwards for different dimensions.)
command-shift-4 then space - application window

System looks fine, mine is 3.4 GB. the system folder houses all the OS X files. to slim it down you could of unchecked the printer drivers, extra languages, extra fonts etc in the Mac OS X installer. you can use monolingual to remove all the extra languages (only use the languages tab!) and delete the extra printer drives in /Library/Printers or home/Library/Printers.

if you dont use GarageBand you can slim down the main Library by deleting the Apple Loops from /Library/Application Support/GarageBand/Apple Loops.

this is all of course if you want to slim down your install even more.

usr, bin & sbin contain the unix files and the two mach files are the kernel. private contains your swap file whose size depends on how much RAM you have.

your users folder looks alright. that all depends on if theres another user other than you. theres not that much you can do to slim it down other than deleting you documents, music etc.

but it looks like a pretty standard install size to me.

to install an app from a disk image open it, drag the app to the applications folder, eject the disk image and trash it. look here for more info

This works perfectly

This all happened to me and apple support call 3 times said it was app files ???.

I got the free ONYX program, checked on hidden files, and there was a 100GIG 18 month old file.

Deleted it ,gained 100Gigs instantly of my 256gig drive,crazy

Omnidisc 'did not' show the 100 GIG file