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Suddenly, LITERALLY, I have 0kb Hard Drive Space?!

sonictonic

sonictonic

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Mar 25, 2006
954
11
San Jose, California
I am freaking out here :(

My MacBook was PERFECT until now... and I've not had a single issue. However, today I did a successful BootCamp install with Windows XP. It all went great and things were fine. What got me into this mess is that I had only given myself 10GB for the XP partition, so after about 6 hours I decided ot start over and give it a little more next time. I used BootCamp to restore the partition to one part, with OS X. I thought all was fine.

Well then I went to repartition using BootCamp starting from square 1. I chose to make the partition 15GB and I had 30GB available so I thought that would be fine. But no, I got an error saying "some files cannot be moved" and it told me to reinstall OS X basically and start all over again. Not happy with that answer I searched the forums and found some other people with this issue, and only found one post with a pseudo-answer, to reduce the GB by 1 each time and see if it works. So I tried amking it 14GB, and NOW I get an error saying I need to run Disk Repair. UGH! :mad: So I do... and my disk has NO PROBLEMS. I have run disk permissions and repair disk several times now and all is fine. But the HUGE problem now that krept on me I have no idea how, is when I was in disk utility I decided to "erase free space" to get more space for the hell of it. Well, toward the end of this process I get a popup message saying I am almost out of disk space. WTF?! I had 30GB, was on the path to erasing more to get MORE room... and suddenly I have 0KB on my hard drive.

WHAT on earth is taking up this missing 30GB of space?! The puzzling thing is I have run Disk Inventory X and also OmniDiskSweeper, and the FIRST box that pops up for both of those programs, say I am using 111GB of my hard drive space (which is ALL of it).... BUT, once the second window loads where it shows what files you have and what's taking up the room, then it says I am only using 80GB. SO WHICH IS IT?! :confused:

I am getting conflicting information... as my mac now THINKS I am using EVERY SINGLE BYTE on my computer, even though according to 2 disk management tools, I am NOT. I should have ~30GB available and I don't! :(

What happened... :( Can anyone help me? I'm scared!

Thanks...
 
Your post is a little tricky to read, am I correct in that you re-verified the volume using Disk Utility after you ran into the problem? Make sure you're booted from DVD when you do so.
 
I have tried that :( Booted fromt he OSX disk 1, and it seems to think I am using up EVERY SINGLE BYTE on my 'single partition' hard drive. 0 bytes available! I ran the repair and it found NOTHING.

I am under the impression it could be some log file in some folder named "var" ??? I read this in one of the posts I found while searching... but I cannot find this log file in spotlight... maybe because it's "private"? How can I find/access "private" folders and files?

Please forgive any ignorance I may have... this is my first "bad" experience with my Mac and I am learning! Well, I hope to learn from this anyway. Even though I don't think I did anything wrong! :p
 
could you try using Onyx (freeware) to clean up your system? give it a try, just run it in your flash drive.
 
I really don't wanna buy software though #1, and also like I said, both OmniSweeper AND DiskInventoryX do NOT see what is taking up this space. That's what's so weird... :mad:

Edit:
So let me recap and update you guys what's going on now. My system seems ot be running fine, my stuff is in tact and I erased a 4GB folder I have backed up anyway so now I have about 4GB free. This amount hasn't changed. The disk space was going down faster than a speeding bullet DURING the process of "erase empty space" in DiskUtility. Now that I'm not in there, I seem stable now. BUT, I need the space back obviously. :(

Edit #2:
Ah. Onyx you said, not Omni. LOL Sorry. Freeware = good :D Let me give it a shot. Thanks...
 
onyx is free, the reason I suggest it is because once I recovered 6GB disk space with it.
 
UNbelieveable. Well, I have my space back now! Though I'm completely and utterly perplexed. I loaded Onyx, looked through logs finding some weird little issues but nothing worth 30GB of space... but I went through the maintenence sections and did a couple small things, like "force empy trash" and guess what. Suddenly I had something in my trash can. There was NOTHING in there before... and therefor I could not try to empty it. Now after all I've been through, and after a few restarts/shutdowns, that "Recovered Files" folder showed up in there and it erased almost instantly when I emptied the can out, and I suddenly had my free space all back. :eek:

Can anyone tell me WHY this crap would/could happen? Basically I wanna know why I had 30GB of crap somehow (empty crap?) wasting this space or whatever, and it took a 3rd party app to get it out and clearmy system back up? That's a little disturbing... :confused:
 
same thing happened to me when I erased free space, but once it finished it was fine. Perhaps you interrupted the erasing at some point? I dont know what else it could be.
 
it feels like there is a glitch in OSX about this, it doesn't happen often, but it IS there. As if the system backed up some big files you deleted to a hidden location.
Anyway, congrats for the success.
 
Mernak said:
same thing happened to me when I erased free space, but once it finished it was fine. Perhaps you interrupted the erasing at some point? I dont know what else it could be.
Click to expand...
not really, last time it happened to me, i left my machine on over night, in the morning I found the disk space unreasonably lost 6GB over night, I didn't delete anything at that time.
 
Same thing happened to me.

I was messing around in Disk Utility when suddenly, there was 0kb of space left. :eek:



Just emptied the trash and shabam!
 
I have a 12" PB 867 with a 40GB HD. Once I installed iTunes 7, my space dwindled down to zero. I didnt change anything else. I think its the album artwork for all my 3000+ songs.
 
sonictonic said:
I am under the impression it could be some log file in some folder named "var" ??? I read this in one of the posts I found while searching... but I cannot find this log file in spotlight... maybe because it's "private"? How can I find/access "private" folders and files?
Click to expand...
A good programme is MacPilot. Download that and you can make all hidden files visible.
 
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