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Incorrect Hard Drive Usage in OS X

Roy Hobbs

Roy Hobbs

macrumors 68000
Original poster
Apr 29, 2005
1,866
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OS X is telling me my 500 gig Hard Drive has 430 gig used. Which is about 130 gig higher than my estimation.

What Size, OmniDiskSweeper and Disk Inventory X all report around 300 gig being used.

Any ideas how I can reclaim this approximate 130 gig???

Thanks and yes I have rebooted and repaired permissions.
 
OK so I ran all the cleanup utilities in Onyx and I am still 130gig above what I should be.

Anyone have any ideas??
 
You might want to boot off you Mac OS Disc and repair the main disc. The count might be off.
 
I booted from my Snow Leopard disc and did a disc repair....didn't help.

I have 8 gig of RAM in my MacBook Pro so I doubt its the swap file. Plus I think that gets flushed on reboot

Any other idea before I wipe and restore?
 
Roy Hobbs said:
I booted from my Snow Leopard disc and did a disc repair....didn't help.

I have 8 gig of RAM in my MacBook Pro so I doubt its the swap file. Plus I think that gets flushed on reboot

Any other idea before I wipe and restore?
Click to expand...

Well, I have a similar problem. I have a 350G internal drive on my iMac with Snow Leopard. The other day I came home to see that DISK IS FULL kept coming up. I checked INFO and sure enough, it was saying no space left.
I checked my CLONE drives, and they say 60G space left. This is what it should be. I added up the GET INFO's of the root drive folders and sure enough, I should have 60G left or so. Spent time on the phone with Apple Care and after trying to repair disk, nothing was different. I need to RESTORE entire drive after NEW PARTITION to clear drive. They said that they did hear of this but it's very rare. It can mean that the drive is going bad, but nothing is confirmed. I'm going to just copy from my clone drive and see what happens with the INFO first.. I don't want to do a clean install and put all the time into it if there's a drive problem, as I'll get a new drive if it doesn't work out, and at that time do a clean install.
According to my conversation with Apple Care, adding up all the GET INFO in folders of root drive should be close to what it's saying for the total.
Did restoring your entire drive correct the usage total for you?
 
artwindows said:
Well, I have a similar problem. I have a 350G internal drive on my iMac with Snow Leopard. The other day I came home to see that DISK IS FULL kept coming up. I checked INFO and sure enough, it was saying no space left.
I checked my CLONE drives, and they say 60G space left. This is what it should be. I added up the GET INFO's of the root drive folders and sure enough, I should have 60G left or so. Spent time on the phone with Apple Care and after trying to repair disk, nothing was different. I need to RESTORE entire drive after NEW PARTITION to clear drive. They said that they did hear of this but it's very rare. It can mean that the drive is going bad, but nothing is confirmed. I'm going to just copy from my clone drive and see what happens with the INFO first.. I don't want to do a clean install and put all the time into it if there's a drive problem, as I'll get a new drive if it doesn't work out, and at that time do a clean install.
According to my conversation with Apple Care, adding up all the GET INFO in folders of root drive should be close to what it's saying for the total.
Did restoring your entire drive correct the usage total for you?
Click to expand...

The clean install of OS X did the trick. I was 99% sure it would since other utilities were reporting correct usage and only OS X was off. Good luck with yours
 
Roy Hobbs said:
The clean install of OS X did the trick. I was 99% sure it would since other utilities were reporting correct usage and only OS X was off. Good luck with yours
Click to expand...

I am planning to use the clone to write over a newly erased internal drive, the one that's incorrect. Did you ever hear what would caused it to register incorrect info? Also, your drive didn't go bad then, right?
Thanks for your info Roy.. it's very helpful..
 
artwindows said:
I am planning to use the clone to write over a newly erased internal drive, the one that's incorrect. Did you ever hear what would caused it to register incorrect info? Also, your drive didn't go bad then, right?
Thanks for your info Roy.. it's very helpful..
Click to expand...

Never got an answer, but I didn't bother calling Apple either.
The drive is fine....like I said OmniSweep and Disk Inventory reported everything correctly. OS X was the only thing reporting back differently
 
Roy Hobbs said:
Never got an answer, but I didn't bother calling Apple either.
The drive is fine....like I said OmniSweep and Disk Inventory reported everything correctly. OS X was the only thing reporting back differently
Click to expand...

Thanks.. very weird. I'll let you know if I hear anything on this. I don't like when things just happen with no explanation. Usually in the mac world, there's always a reason when something acts strange.
Have a great New Year. Rick
 
Have you tried Grand Perspective? I noticed my free space was fluctuating wildly, ran GP and found that my daily log files could be as large as a couple of gigabytes, then just a few kilobytes. Not sure exactly what was causing the day-to-day variation, but GP saved me from needless worry.

mt

P.S. I believe Grand Perspective and Disk Inventory X use a similar codebase, though GP is newer.
 
Combined solution

I had this issue as well. 250gig where everything added up to 160 but get info said I only had 5 meg and at times would run out of hard disk. A restart would bring it back to 4gig but that still was not right. I talked to several people and very few have seen this. I found this thread and applied a great combination.

I had already repaired perms, repaired disk etc etc... I downloaded Grand Perspective and used a program called Houdini 3 to see hidden files once GP had pointed them out to me. Were my eyes opened. :eek: The ability to SEE what was on the drive was more help (and fun) than I thought it would be. What I found was a volume archive that was not seen in the normal view. I was also able to find file duplication and general cleanup.

After this I erased free space and now I have 121 gig free.

Great find, and thank you all for the help. I manage 10-20 'puters running windows and Mac OS from 9 to Snow Leopard and have never had this exact thing happen.
 
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