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TigerBluez

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Hi,

A client of mine is running 10.4 and seems to be undergoing some kind of hard drive failure or malware infection, although I can't seem to determine which. The hard drive reports itself as being 100% full (0 bytes available on the entire system), even when significant efforts are made to clear up space. For example, I just deleted of 3 gigabytes of photos and music from her computer to clear up space, emptied the trash bin, and yet it still reported 0 bytes available. Either resulting from this or stemming from a more chronic problem, it is also completely impossible to open any files on the machine, such as word documents, etc, although IPhoto still seems to function properly. I have used the disk utility to run all permission and verification checks possible on the disk, as well as to repair them, and nothing has resolved the situation. I am precariously close to copying the data onto a server and wiping the computer clean in order to simply start over from scratch. Does anyone have any idea what might be occurring?
 
No offense, but if you are using terminology such as "your client," you should know that OS X is pretty impenetrable to malware, even if said malware existed (which at this point, there is no currently recognized mac malware running rampant in the wild). Also, if the drive is failing (on the software side of things), you should investigate the journal, catalog file, and partition map. Repairing permissions won't fix that.
 
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