Help clearing my Hard Drive space

[bigbenwd]

Hey everyone,

I have a mid 2014 MBP 15 inch, it has the 512 GB SSD in it, and i'm trying to clear some space off of it so I can dual boot more easily with plenty of space on my windows partition. I just deleted ~100GB from my HD, but the free space didn't go up at all. In the about this mac tab I now have 160GB of 'other' taken up. I deleted a few 1 GB files individually, and it didn't clear up the space at all in disk utility. I went into erase to erase free space on my HD and that was greyed out. How can I clear the deleted info off of my HD for real? It seems like it's simply making the information inaccessible for some reason. Very frustrating. Also i'm on 10.9.5.

 

[beernut]

Did you empty trash?

 

[bigbenwd]

Yes, I have emptied the trash.

 

[beernut]

Try a few additional options here:
https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201583

 

[BrettApple]

It's a glitch in Mavericks. Mine would do the same exact thing. When I booted into the recovery partition and ran disk utility I could run first aid on it (verify disk basically) and it would clear things up and the free space would be accurate again.

Then I could go ahead and while I'm in there shrink the partition and it would be good to go. Or reboot and run Boot Camp Utility.

It recently resurfaced under El Capitan after removing 2.8 TB from my external with it not reflecting the changes. It eventually figured it out though a few hours later, go figure.

Also the erase free space function isn't available on SSDs as it only applies to hard drives. It overwrites deleted files on magnetic media so not applicable to flash memory.

 

[bigbenwd]

I have no items left in the trash to delete, there never were any. I have verified disk. I have verified and repaired disk permissions. I have rebooted the computer, I have attempted to force a secure empty of the trash. I have this massive 'other' that is sapping all of my space :/
[doublepost=1478893571][/doublepost]

It's a glitch in Mavericks. Mine would do the same exact thing. When I booted into the recovery partition and ran disk utility I could run first aid on it (verify disk basically) and it would clear things up and the free space would be accurate again.

Then I could go ahead and while I'm in there shrink the partition and it would be good to go. Or reboot and run Boot Camp Utility.

It recently resurfaced under El Capitan after removing 2.8 TB from my external with it not reflecting the changes. It eventually figured it out though a few hours later, go figure.

thank you! I will attemt and I will report back if successful

 

[Weaselboy]

Hey everyone,

I have a mid 2014 MBP 15 inch, it has the 512 GB SSD in it, and i'm trying to clear some space off of it so I can dual boot more easily with plenty of space on my windows partition. I just deleted ~100GB from my HD, but the free space didn't go up at all. In the about this mac tab I now have 160GB of 'other' taken up. I deleted a few 1 GB files individually, and it didn't clear up the space at all in disk utility. I went into erase to erase free space on my HD and that was greyed out. How can I clear the deleted info off of my HD for real? It seems like it's simply making the information inaccessible for some reason. Very frustrating. Also i'm on 10.9.5.

Do you have Time Machine turned on? If you do, when you delete files they don't really get deleted, but they get moved to a hidden /.MobileBackups folder that uses space. If you just turn Time Machine off briefly then back on, it will clear out this space.

More info at this link.

http://support.apple.com/en-us/HT202301