I have more free space on my HD than capacity - eh !?

[nick mulder]

Hello all,

I've noticed that my mac HD icon in the finder (10.7.4) will increase its free space qouta whenever I delete something, but its not so hot at noticing new files - could be wrong about the mechanism behind this error but regardless the net result is this bit of nonsense:

Free space just got bigger than the drive hence I now feel compelled to post


What is going on ?

How to fix ?

System profiler and disk util show the correct disk usage. Restart finder doesn't fix...

Sorry if this has been covered already - I found it hard to come up with non-generic search terms for this issue

 

[Nermal]

This is a wild guess, but try rebooting while holding Cmd-S. At the prompt, type

fsck -fy /

I can't remember whether it's "reboot" or "shutdown -r now" to get back into the GUI afterwards

 

[nick mulder]

I dont fsck on the first date

Had to look it up before I uploaded my CC details direct to you ... But, as it turns out:

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/3983143?start=0&tstart=0

 

[Nermal]

You don't need to be scared of a little fsck

That linked thread is interesting; I've never run into that and figured that it was a filesystem corruption issue (fsck being FileSystem ChecK).

 

[Mr. Retrofire]

Is your HD size 500 GB?

Btw, fsck is not necessary, because the OS uses fsck before it mounts a volume on the desktop.

 

[Nermal]

Btw, fsck is not necessary, because the OS uses fsck before it mounts a volume on the desktop.

It does a "mini check"; compare the time taken to run fsck with the time taken to mount a volume and you'll see that there's no way that it's running all of the checks