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jaxonkohne

macrumors member
Original poster
Jun 18, 2008
65
0
Thunder Bay, Ontario, Canada
Hi there,

I have a first generation iMac G5 and it come with 80GB of internal storage. The drive is so full that i rarely have more than 2 GB available. even seeing 1 is becoming hard. I checked the size of all the areas of the computer and together all the files visible on the Macintosh HD only amount to about 61GB This leaves anywhere between 17-19GB (counting the way they mesure GB) of space that is not accounted for. i understand there are hidden system files and other things that are not visible to the Finder, but this number seems outragous. I was thinking of backing up my entire computer. zeroing out the hardrive and reinstalling the OS and starting from scratch. If i wanted to do this maintaining the same documents files applications preferences and users. what would be the best way?
Help is greatly appreciated.

JaxonK
 

Hellhammer

Moderator emeritus
Dec 10, 2008
22,164
582
Finland
How about external hard drive? Those are so cheap nowadays. Does your model have FireWire 400 or 800?

Just get one ext. HD with FW800 and you won't notice any difference. 500GB cost less than 50$
 

jaxonkohne

macrumors member
Original poster
Jun 18, 2008
65
0
Thunder Bay, Ontario, Canada
Well I have a 1 Tb external here. and im going to back up my computer fully i just dont want to get to tthe point where i erased my hardrive i reinstall and replace everything then find that those hidden files were neccesary, and werent replace through the reinstallation
 

Hellhammer

Moderator emeritus
Dec 10, 2008
22,164
582
Finland
Those "hidden" files will come back when you reinstall, that's the point of that. You mean that you are going to reformat your hard drive? So everything will be lost?
 

jaxonkohne

macrumors member
Original poster
Jun 18, 2008
65
0
Thunder Bay, Ontario, Canada
not even fully reformat, just erase the data and on the hardrive hopefully removing unwanted "hidden" files because there is roughly 18Gigs of un-accounted for space being taken up on my hard drive and i cant find whats using it.. i know the operating system is only a few gigs so that doesnt even make sense.
 

Hellhammer

Moderator emeritus
Dec 10, 2008
22,164
582
Finland
Actuallay the OS is something like 15gigs. There are those register files which are impossible to delete with finder.

What you have on your HD? What makes it so full?
 

armoguy94

macrumors 6502
Nov 9, 2007
388
0
Same problem here with G5 iMac and Aluminum iMac. I would get a bigger HD for my Alu but it's too risky for me since Apple likes to make things hard and make such a crap way of upgrading your mac yourself unlike the old G5 imac
 

rust.puppet

macrumors regular
Jul 18, 2008
233
0
Ashtabula, OH
How about external hard drive? Those are so cheap nowadays. Does your model have FireWire 400 or 800?

Just get one ext. HD with FW800 and you won't notice any difference. 500GB cost less than 50$

holy crap where can i get a 500 gig for less than 50$ i was about to buy a 320 for like 80 (mybook)
 

H$R

macrumors 6502
Apr 1, 2008
352
0
Switzerland
You have to keep in mind: you don't have real 80GB to use. It's more like 74. (if you don't know why, look up in the "Byte" article in Wikipedia.

What I would do: save all files on an external drive and reinstall your OS. But do a custom install. Leave everything away you don't need like printer drivers (this alone saves you several GB's)

and then use monolingual as the poster above said. It will remove all unwanted languages and more.

And maybe you even have some apps installed you never use. Get rid of them to.

And otherwise, just buy you an USB hard drive for your files.
 

gamer2502

macrumors regular
Dec 7, 2008
136
0
near Pittsburgh,pa
use carbon copy cloner to make a exact copy of all the contents on your hdd into a image and then if it dosent work you have all of your hdd's contents right there:apple:
 

angemon89

macrumors 68000
Feb 5, 2008
1,846
110
Northern CA
Yeah, get rid of those printer drivers. Funny because just today I was at my cousins house and he told me he was running out of space on his iMac. I got rid of his printer drivers and that opened up about 4 gigs of space for him.
 

vw1300

macrumors newbie
Dec 31, 2008
18
0
If you don't use garageband, you can delete a bunch of its music files to free up some space. Or delete the whole thing altogether. Also, you can delete foreign language support files.

I have that model G5, when I first got it, I only had 61GB of free space, the OS etc. took up 13GB. 61GB is still not a lot.

Charlie
 

sickmacdoc

macrumors 68020
Jun 14, 2008
2,035
1
New Hampshire
One thing nice about that model of iMac is that it is a very simple matter to replace the internal drive in it when compared to replacing them in later iMacs. While that does not directly address getting rid of unneeded files as such, you could sure have some cheap extra space for additional projects, etc. and to insure that you have adequate free space to avoid problems.

500Gb internal drives are commonly available for $50-$55 and some 1Tb internals have now fallen under $100 for example. mwave.com even ran a special yesterday for Samsung 1Tb drives for $60!
 

redgaz26

macrumors 68020
Mar 6, 2007
2,298
6
Glasgow
Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 2_2_1 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/525.18.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.1.1 Mobile/5H11 Safari/525.20)

You could also use "what size"
It scans your entire hard drive and will tell you exactly what size each file and folder is. Hence the name!!!!!
 
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