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MacBook hard drive mysteriously full - HELP!

Miles Davis

Miles Davis

macrumors member
Original poster
Mar 22, 2004
51
4
My MacBook was not starting all of the iLife programs when I clicked on them, Apple care told me to reinstall 10.4, which I did, which I blieve created a backup of my old system. It has been working well for a week and I just added all of my music from my external harddrive (I had never put it on the MB, it was from my old mac). Yesterday, it told me that I didn't have any virtual memory to run iTunes. I check my harddrive and found that it was full! I've checked every folder in my harddrive and nothing adds up to 60GB. iTunes is only 16GB. Soooo, I called Applecare to try to find the backup file, or at least locate all of this missing space. They were extremely unhelpful, I know more about macs than this woman did. She was more interested in selling me the upgrade than helping me. After 40 minutes, I got no where. Has anyone else had this problem? What should I do?

Thanks,
M
 
The backup should be in a folder called Previous Systems or something similar in Macintosh HD. I had a similar problem with my old powerbook, when I upgraded to Tiger, I had that folder, and it was just a few GB of nothingness. But I didn't have that much on it then.
 
I don't have any such folder. We're are talking about 20-30GB of missing space. I've done a search for large files, all I have is one .avi of 700mb. This is driving me crazy and I'll be pissed if I have to install 10.4 again. This IS a new computer after all.
 
Miles Davis said:
I don't have any such folder. We're are talking about 20-30GB of missing space. I've done a search for large files, all I have is one .avi of 700mb. This is driving me crazy and I'll be pissed if I have to install 10.4 again. This IS a new computer after all.
Click to expand...

Maybe, although I doubt it, alot of this missing space is in hidden folders. To see them, install a program called OnyX (I think it works on intel, haven't tried it yet though), and in finder, enable them. Then check those.
 
I always use a program called Whatsize. It will give you the size of every file and folder on your HD.

It's Universal too.
 
ODS or WhatSize should tell you where the problem is. Just be sure that you run it while you're logged in as a user with administrative privileges (if you have multiple accounts)...otherwise it won't be able to see everything.
 
Thanks for all the help everyone. I used WhatSize. It found a file called windowserver_last.log that was 20GB! It is in private/var/log. The problem is, I cannot locate that anywhere. Even with Spotlight. Is this okay to delete, what is it?
 
Well done. In Finder, press COMMAND-SHIFT-G and paste private/var/log in the accompanying dialogue box. Find that file and delete it. It's a log file so removing it won't affect anything. It's a bit of a bug in OSX that occasionally lets logs grow outrageously. :)
 
I did a search after I posted, it seems this has happened to other people to. I went into Terminal and deleted it with "sudo". Is this going to happen again? Is there anything I am doing wrong to let it happen?
 
No, you're not doing anything wrong. It just happens every once in a while...it's a bug and it's fairly rare. If it happens frequently, it might be worth trying to track down the cause, but I wouldn't worry about it for now.
 
my mac book air drive is full

I have a question..I run whatsize in my computer and there is a file of 6GB that is called private...can I erase that, how do I do it? When I check the storage there are 50 GB in OTHER..solutions???
 
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