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I have no harddisk space, any thoughts?

CrackedButter

CrackedButter

macrumors 68040
Original poster
I woke up this morning and OSX reported that there was no space on the startup disk and its true, somehow I have lost 9 GB's of space overnight, OSX says i'm using all available space.

I know this is not true, I have no programs or anything that could create 9GB's of data overnight. I ran disk permissions before I went to bed as well.

Any thoughts?
 
here's one idea

open up a Terminal and run the following. you'll be prompted each time for your password:

% sudo /etc/daily
% sudo /etc/weekly
% sudo /etc/monthly
 
Terminal says there is no such job and what am i searching for in the finder? What are the search parametres?
 
CrackedButter said:
Terminal says there is no such job and what am i searching for in the finder? What are the search parametres?
Click to expand...

use 'date modified' 'is within' 'the last day' (or you can use 'the last 2 days') then search. it will bring up a lot of random files. but scrole over and there should be a size colum. click that to organize by file size (largest at top) and maybe there will be some wierd 9GB file there.
 
It has happened to me twice that my 9 GB disappeared and I got the same message that there is not enough disk space. Last time it happened the culprit was console logs. Open your terminal and write
cd /library/logs (press enter)
Then write
du -s -h * (press enter)

This would show you the size of each file in the log. If you see that the size of console is very big like in GB then write
cd console (press enter)
then write
ls (press enter).
It will show a folder with your name. Then write
cd thatName
then again write du -s -h * , to see which file is bloated. It will show files like console.log.0 console.log.1 and their sizes. If you see some bloated GB files, delete it.
 
Oh yeah.. somethng similar to this happened to me some time and I spent so much time trying to know what was going on, so its as simple as this huh..
Thanks...
 
CrackedButter said:
Terminal says there is no such job
Click to expand...
then you did something wrong. cut/paste the actual text (what you typed and what you got back) and we'll suss it out.

btw, those are jobs that the OS will run on a periodic basis that cleans up the system, including the kinds of files that grow over time and eat up a lot of disk space.
 
A much easier alternative than the terminal. If you have room download Macjanitor, a small freeware app. It is a GUI app that runs the same processes as the terminal commands, just a little easier.
 
I downloaded macjanitor and it hasn't solved the problem.

Also, to the person who is asking me to perform a search with a date modifed parameter, I don't understand how you typed out that kind of search.

What am i searching for?

At this moment I feel such a thickhead... what you are asking me is probably something simple.
 
CrackedButter said:
Terminal says there is no such job
Click to expand...

Don't type the % symbols, zim's just trying to confuse you 😛 (especially considering that Panther uses $ not %).

So just type:

sudo /etc/daily
sudo /etc/weekly
sudo /etc/monthly
 
CrackedButter said:
Also, to the person who is asking me to perform a search with a date modifed parameter, I don't understand how you typed out that kind of search.
Click to expand...
 

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Why didn't somebody say Apple F?

Dammit! I've been searching in the box in the finder.

Thankyou for your help btw.

Now get this...

When I typed the latter "b" in the search box, the finder kept reloading. Also the program, "backup" would not open, insisting on finishing a job which it wouldn't start. Plus when I went to reinstall OSX, the installation process found my missing GB's.

I've reinstalled now as I think the problem was with backup and yet I couldn't access it plus the finder was acting up, repairing permissions didn't help and for some reason the laptop i'm using wouldn reboot either.

I seem to have had 4 problems hit me all in one go.

I will note something however, all my troubles started to happen when I set up Backup to copy certain files and folders to my external HD, we're talking GB's of information here as well. But not enough i think to fill up 9GB's incase I pointed the destination at my own internal drive, which I would of found because everything defaults to the parents directorys in the home folder.

Anyway... fresh new system now and no problems.
 
I once had a problem like this and the culprit was with my console log, somehow it managed to expand to 20GB in an hour or so and I just trashed it. Never found out what happened.
 
CrackedButter said:
Why didn't somebody say Apple F?

Dammit! I've been searching in the box in the finder.

Thankyou for your help btw.
Click to expand...

If you're using Mac OS X.3 (Panther) there is a search box in every finder window. Its in the top right.
 
mklos said:
If you're using Mac OS X.3 (Panther) there is a search box in every finder window. Its in the top right.
Click to expand...

If you had been reading you will notice that there are distinct differences between both searches, Apple F provides more options to search with.
 
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