filevault, lost HD space and new sparseimage

[kpear]

I have an iBook G4, Tiger, 55 gb HDD. Before I turned off my filevault I had about 26 gb of HDD space. Now, I have only 13, and when I turn on the computer it wants to open a sparseimage, which seems to be a copy with the same user name. I can find the sparseimage in Disc Utility, but not in Finder. Is there an extra "image" of my user somewhere on my harddrive now? How to I get that space back? Can I delete that sparseimage?
I am not familiar with roots and working in the terminal, but will try.
Thanks in advance for any and all help!

 

[BlueRevolution]

Try opening /Applications/Utilities/Terminal.app and typing

rm /Users/.*.sparseimage

(I think that's the right spot. I havent used FileVault in a while.)

Edit: Try what angelwatt suggests first.

 

[angelwatt]

It no longer has the .sparseimage extension. It's just .username for the account. It's as a hidden folder and contains the actual data so do not delete it. The account folder the user sees in folder is just an alias to the data. The sparse image for your FileVault account should appear in Disk Utility under normal circumstances.

It's possible the sparse image you're seeing is left over from turning on FileVault and may not have gotten deleted automatically. Do the following in Terminal,

cd /Users
ls -ga

[That second line starts LS as lowercase, not a one.]
For comparison here is what I get.

:/Users> ls -ga
total 0
drwxr-xr-x   7 admin   238 Apr 15 19:23 .
drwxrwxr-t  34 admin  1224 Apr  2 23:22 ..
[B][COLOR="Blue"]dr-x------   3 staff   102 Oct 17  2009 .angelwatt[/COLOR][/B]
drwxrwxrwt   5 wheel   170 Oct 17  2009 Shared
[B][COLOR="Blue"]drwx------  76 staff  2652 Apr  3 20:23 angelwatt[/COLOR][/B]

I made the lines that pertain to my FileVault account bold. Your permissions may not match up completely with mine.

 

[BlueRevolution]

By the way, angelwatt, the -g flag in Mac OS X is depreciated in favour of -l.

 

[angelwatt]

By the way, angelwatt, the -g flag in Mac OS X is depreciated in favour of -l.

I always toy between the two, but the l is often confused for a 1 or I so I try to avoid it.

 

[kpear]

Thanks Angelwatt, sorry I have responded earlier, but I am in Europe and went to bed.
I did this and got a whole bunch of stuff (line code?).
What do I do with it?
How can I tell its the sparseimage I want to get rid of ?
THANKS SO MUCH! I have this question on other thread and your the first with some kind of answer!
Here's some of what I see:
Welcome to Darwin!
karl-pearsons-ibook-g4:~ kpear$ ls -ga
total 288
drwxr-xr-x 37 kpear 1258 Apr 20 09:21 .
drwxrwxr-t 7 admin 238 Apr 20 09:08 ..
-rw-r--r-- 1 kpear 3 May 11 2008 .CFUserTextEncoding
-rw-r--r-- 1 kpear 15364 Apr 20 09:21 .DS_Store
drw------- 9 kpear 306 Apr 18 09:11 .Spotlight-V100
drwxrwxrwt 3 kpear 102 May 12 2008 .TemporaryItems
drwx------ 2 kpear 68 Apr 20 09:21 .Trash
d-wx-wx-wt 2 admin 68 May 12 2008 .Trashes
drwxr-x--x 3 kpear 102 May 21 2008 .adobe
-rw------- 1 kpear 864 Apr 21 06:02 .bash_history
drwxr-xr-x 5 kpear 170 Aug 29 2009 .blurb
drwxr-xr-x 8 kpear 272 Apr 19 20:41 .dropbox
drwxr-xr-x 13 kpear 442 Jan 24 08:40 .dvdcss
-rw-r--r-- 1 kpear 30 May 3 2009 .lpoptions
drwxr-xr-x 34 staff 1156 Aug 16 2005 .spumux
drwxr-xr-x 3 kpear 102 Sep 6 2009 Applications

 

[BlueRevolution]

Try:

ls -la ..

I always toy between the two, but the l is often confused for a 1 or I so I try to avoid it.

Fair point. Whoever designed the Latin alphabet was clearly an idiot.

 

[angelwatt]

Thanks Angelwatt, sorry I have responded earlier, but I am in Europe and went to bed.
I did this and got a whole bunch of stuff (line code?).

It looks like the skipped the "cd /Users" line, which moves you to the Users folder, which is where we need the output from. BlueRevolution's given command above will let you skip that step if you enter it after first opening Terminal (which starts you in your home directory).

 

[kpear]

Hey, I tried to do what bluerevolution asked and permission was denied.

 

[kpear]

OK, I did the cd /Users ls -ga
and this is what I got
drwxrwxr-t 7 admin 238 Apr 20 09:08 .
drwxrwxr-t 41 admin 1496 Apr 20 09:19 ..
-rw-rw-r-- 1 admin 6148 Apr 21 09:14 .DS_Store
dr-x------ 3 kpear 102 May 12 2008 .kpear
-rw-r--r-- 1 wheel 0 Mar 21 2005 .localized
drwxrwxrwt 7 wheel 238 Dec 23 20:03 Shared
drwxr-xr-x 37 kpear 1258 Apr 20 09:21 kpear
what do I do next?

 

[angelwatt]

That output looks fine there. Next, maybe we can confirm where this large sparse image is. I use Grand Perspective for getting a graphical view of disk space usage. Find out where the large sparse image is and report back the full path to it. Essentially trying to figure out if it's in some temp area or within your user account. Once found, if you have a external HD you can move it there and see if your account still works fine.

 

[BlueRevolution]

Wouldn't it be inside /Users/.kpear? I was going to suggest deleting it, but I figured I'd wait until you had your say first this time.

 

[angelwatt]

Wouldn't it be inside /Users/.kpear? I was going to suggest deleting it, but I figured I'd wait until you had your say first this time.

Probably, but I try not to assume since something seems to have gone awry. I am curious about the full path to it in order to help figure out if it's duplicate data or not, which should help determine if it's safe to delete.

Something I should have asked sooner. Have you logged out since turning FileVault on? Extra HD space used by FileVault is only reclaimed at log out.