Give me back my HD space!!!

[thecow]

I first noticed the problem that I have now when I was downloading a fairly large file on safari. The finder alerted me that I was low on disk space, and sure enough, when I checked, I had about 100 megs left. I know before i downloaded the file I had about 10 gigs free and the file was only 1GB. I moved some extra things that I didn't need onto my external hd and off of my internal one. After that, it said that I had about 3.5 gigs free on my internal HD.That still wasn't right. I used carbon copy cloner to copy my entire internal HD to the backup partition on my external HD. I erased the backup partition before I did this. I checked the backup partition and it said that it had 11 GB free. The backup partition and my internal HD are both 20GB.. If I select all of the items on my hd and select Get Info, it says that they take up 4.65GB but it says that I have 3.54GB free on the window. It says the came thing in the activity viewer. I restarted, repaired permissions, and reset the PRAM. Argh! Why doesn't it work?

Edit: Added pictures. The second 2 are from the activity monitor.

 

[cb911]

swap files? i used to have a similar problem, but if you reboot, that should clear it out.

do you use FileVault? i dont' know, but it might be that...

most likely it's some hidden folder that you can't select in Finder. i'm sure there is a handy Terminal command you could use to check this out.... but i can't think of it exactly now. i know it would probably be ls with some other flags on it, but i dont' really know all that much about it.

and isn't it a bit hard to read things with that theme?

 

[AdamR01]

i dont' know, but it might be that...

most likely it's some hidden folder that you can't select in Finder. i'm sure there is a handy Terminal command you could use to check this out.... but i can't think of it exactly now. i know it would probably be ls with some other flags on it, but i dont' really know all that much about it.

and isn't it a bit hard to read things with that theme?

Yeah you are right. ls -a will list hidden files and folders and ls -al will list them in a list saying if they are a directory or file or symbolic link instead of listing multiple items on each line.

 

[thecow]

Cloning it with carbon copy cloner copies everything that is on the hard drive to the other one. Even the hidden files. No, I don't use file vault.

I can see everything fine with the theme that I have. It must be your monitor settings or something.

 

[thecow]

I found it. There was a folder in the volumes folder on my hard drive that had an exact copy of what was on my hard drive. I have no idea how it got there.

 

[yellow]

Yes, selecting the directories visible in your root drive and trying to Get Info for a size doesn't even come close to showing you how much space is actually being used.

From the Terminal, you can use 'df' or 'du' to get the actual size of the drive.

If you're using Panther:

df -h

or

sudo du -sh

Or, if you want to use a GUIfied control to figure out where your "lost" space has gone, use OmniDiskSweeper. Just don't go crazy and erase anything that you 1) don't know what it is and/or 2) don't know what would be effected by you erasing it.

 

[AdamR01]

I found it. There was a folder in the volumes folder on my hard drive that had an exact copy of what was on my hard drive. I have no idea how it got there.

I hope you didnt delete anything inside that because that was your actual drive!
For example, my hard drive is named HDD. In /Volumes there is a Symbolic Link to /. Basically /Volumes/HDD points to /. If you did cd /Volumes/HDD you would delete the files on the drive. If you just deleted HDD in /Volumes you just removed the symbolic link which may or may not cause problems.

 

[thecow]

No, it wasn't a symbolic link, it was a folder. I am sure. When I deleted it, it didn't say anything was in use and I had a few apps open when I did it.

 

[AdamR01]

If you didn't check to see what it was with ls -l you probably wouldnt know which it was. If you were in /Volumes and did rm *YOUR VOLUME NAME HERE* then it could not have been a folder because doing a standard rm command without any flags will not delete a folder only a symlink or a file. The symbolic link points to a directory so it will act like a directory, but its still just a file so you can delete it like a file. Also if it didnt take more than a few seconds to run you really didnt delete anything of a massive size. You'll find out on your next reboot if you need it or not...

Edit: I did a little reading and it sounds like the finder reads all the drives from here. Thats why a symlink to the hard drive is in there. Normally on a *nix system you only would have media from other drives than the boot volume in there.

 

[abhishekit]

No, it wasn't a symbolic link, it was a folder. I am sure. When I deleted it, it didn't say anything was in use and I had a few apps open when I did it.

Nah, your hard drive is always mounted on /volumes. But the boot volume is not there, so you may still be able to boot.

 

[thecow]

I have 2 hard drives on my computer. One of them is partitioned into 2 parts. In the volumes folder there are 3 symbolic links and there was a folder that contained exactly the same data that is on my boot drive. I deleted the folder and everything is fine. I can still boot and all of the apps work fine.

 

[yellow]

The symlink in /Volumes always points at your boot directory. There should be only 1 symlink there.

The rest of the directories there are the other volumes mounted on your Mac.

If you trashed one of those.. it's quite possible you just nuked your clone.

 

[thecow]

I guess since you people don't get what mean by folder, I will take a picture of it. I added an empty folder to show what it looked like before I deleted the folder that was taking up the extra space.

I had to change the theme. The orange was starting to hurt my eyes.

 

[macfreek57]

i think you're using Panther, so…

i would do a search of your dive with only these parameters:

Size>Is Greater Than>1000000 KB (1 gig)
Visibility>visible and invisable items

and see what comes up. you might see something that looks suspicious or maybe more than one copy of a file. maybe you can increase or decrease the "Size" value if you see it fit (1 gig is only my suggestion because under normal use of a computer, there really should be no single file that is greater than that unless you do video or sound recording/editing). if that doesn't come up with anything, try adding:

Kind>Is>Folder